A new breakthrough in artificial intelligence has been achieved through the collaboration of Figure and OpenAI. They’ve demonstrated the impressive abilities of their humanoid robot, Figure 01, in a groundbreaking video released on March 13.
The progress made by Figure in building humanoid robots is truly impressive. Led by entrepreneur Brett Adcock, the company quickly gathered experts from top companies like Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Archer Aviation. Their goal? To create the first general-purpose humanoid robot that’s commercially viable.
The journey from idea to reality has been fast. By October, Figure 01 was already up and running, doing basic tasks on its own. By the end of the year, it could learn from watching and was ready to start working at BMW by mid-January.
During a recent warehouse demonstration, we got a peek into what the future of robotics might look like. This demonstration happened at the same time as Figure announced some big news: they’ve successfully secured Series B funding and teamed up with OpenAI.
Together, they’re working on creating advanced AI models designed specifically for humanoid robots.
Adcock, an American technology entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Figure AI, an AI startup working on a general-purpose humanoid robot, wrote on a social media platform that the collaboration aims to accelerate Figure’s commercial timeline by enhancing the capabilities of humanoid robots to process and reason from language.
Adcock shared important details in the post, explaining that Figure 01’s cameras send data to a smart system trained by OpenAI.
At the same time, Figure’s own networks process images quickly. OpenAI’s work contributes to the robot’s ability to understand spoken commands. This capability ensures that the robot can act precisely in response to verbal instructions.
Moreover, Adcock also made it clear that the demo wasn’t controlled remotely; instead, this demonstration showed that the robot can work on its own.
The progress is really impressive, with Adcock aiming for global-scale operations where humanoid robots play a big role.
They’ll be utilizing this investment to fast-track Figure’s plans for deploying humanoid robots commercially, Adcock writes in the post. These funds will be directed towards various aspects, including AI training, manufacturing, deploying more robots, expanding the engineering team, and pushing forward with commercial deployment efforts.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled the title of this article.
Brit strictly hates when someone says "the future". She considers herself a futurist and believes that there is no such thing as future yet.
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