We recognize AI nowadays as ChatGPT and other software, but artificial intelligence (AI) is merging with hardware nowadays. Specifically, this technology is integrating into robots, making them more useful and versatile than ever.
Robotics firm Figure’s robot is the latest example of this trend. Its Figure 01 bot gained training from OpenAI’s model, enabling it to perform chores simultaneously. More importantly, it can interact with humans while doing tasks, making them slightly more practical than previous bots.
What do we know about the OpenAI robot?
CEO Brett Adcock explained on X that “Figure’s onboard cameras feed into a large vision-language model (VLM) trained by OpenAI.”
VentureBeat said the company hasn’t specified if the VLM is a version of GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest large language model, or a completely different one.
His company also posted a demonstration video on YouTube. It features a human interacting with the Figure 01 robot.
He started the demo by saying, “Hey, Figure One, what do you see right now?” In response, it said, “I see a red apple on the plate in the center of the table, a drying rack with cups and a plate, and you standing nearby with your hand on the table.
The OpenAI robot also showed that it could detect and interact with surrounding objects by grabbing an apple and giving it to the person.
The man asked it to explain its behavior while picking up trash. In response, it said it gave him the apple because it was the only edible thing on the table.
Meanwhile, it was putting trash into a bin. Many would assume the video is fake, but Brett Adcock refuted these claims with this X post:
“The video is showing end-to-end neural networks. There is no teleop. Also, this was filmed at 1.0x speed and shot continuously.”
“As you can see from the video, there’s been a dramatic speed-up of the robot, we are starting to approach human speed.”
Adcock further said, “Our goal is to train a world model to operate humanoid robots at the billion-unit level.”
However, he hasn’t specified a release date for these machines.