I was reading Anthropic’s latest research blog this morning. Usually, AI research papers are incredibly dry. They talk about benchmarks, perplexity, and MMLU scores. This one was about an off-the-shelf robotic dog, a warehouse, and a beach ball.

For the last few years, most of the AI conversation has been about white-collar work. Will AI replace programmers? Analysts? Designers? We spend all our time talking about code, documents, and images. Very few people talk about what happens when AI starts interacting with the real world.

That's why Anthropic's latest experiment, called "Project Fetch: Phase Two," caught my attention.

They bought a mechanical dog, put a beach ball in a room, and wanted to see if they could get the dog to autonomously fetch the ball.