Figure is an AI Robotics company building the world’s first commercially viable autonomous humanoid robot. Their founder Brett Adcock has just posted a massive teaser, suggesting the company has just had a breakthrough in the lab.
The breakthrough is being characterised as a ‘ChatGPT’ moment, a reference to the release of a large language model (ChatGPT) by OpenAI. This product launch effectively changed the direction of AI across the world as the sophistication and abilities of a language model, trained in billions of data points, became clear for all to see.
A ChatGPT moment in the robotics industry suggests the intelligence and capabilities of humanoid robots is likely to take a significant step forward.
Breakthroughs like this can happen when you have a lot of the world’s best engineers focused on some of the most difficult problems, while the breakthrough itself may in hindsight appear obvious.
Figure AI has big ambitions, as they are building a commercially viable autonomous humanoid robot, directly competing with Tesla’s Teslabot. Figure AI’s robot is 5 foot 6 inches in height, weighs 60kg and carries 20kg. It has the ability to walk at 1.2 meters per second and has a run time of 5 hours.
We’ll be watching tomorrow Brett, let’s hope this isn’t overhyped.
The company last released a video 2 months ago of the Figure 01 robot walking.. tomorrow we should see the latest progress from their R&D lab. Walking took just 12 months of development, however, the skills required to be commercially viable involve a lot more than simply walking, the hands and their ability to manipulate objects is equally important, as is the speed at which the robot can learn new skills.
More information at https://www.figure.ai/
Break through will be when robot can learn from its owner, not by reprogramming
I’ve got a lot to teach my future humanoid helper and would like it to cost less than a entry level car, about $5k