(Credit: Figure)
OpenAI plans on using its AI models to help develop a humanoid robot, a project that is also receiving investment from Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
On Thursday, OpenAI announced it's among the companies investing in Figure, a robotics startup in California, which has raised $675 million in its latest Series B funding round.
“In conjunction with this investment, Figure and OpenAI have entered into a collaboration agreement to develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots, combining OpenAI's research with Figure's deep understanding of robotics hardware and software,” the startup said.
(Credit: Figure)The partnership promises to accelerate the “commercial deployment” of Figure’s robots, enabling them to process and reason from incoming human language.
“We see a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models,” added OpenAI VP or Product and Partnerships Peter Welinder in the announcement.
A tweet from OpenAI also notes it plans on expanding its “multimodal models to robotic perception, reasoning, and interaction” when the latest model for ChatGPT can understand text, speech, and images.
So it’s not hard to imagine OpenAI’s models one day powering the intelligence on Figure’s walking and talking robots. The startup’s goal is to develop a general purpose machine that can “eliminate the need for unsafe and undesirable jobs.”
The upcoming robot from Figure is poised to compete with Telsa’s own Optimus bot, another humanoid-like machine from Elon Musk.
Figure says its own team is made up of robotics experts from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Archer Aviation. The startup says it's now valued at over $2.6 billion. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft has invested $95 million in the company while Jeff Bezos’ investment fund has forked over $100 million. OpenAI is only investing $5 million.
Still, the robots from Figure may have a long way to go before they become truly useful. Last month, the company demoed its robot, Figure 01, making coffee. But the test merely involved the machine dropping a coffee cartridge into the Keurig appliance, and then pressing a button. The Figure 01 bot doesn’t even bother handing the made coffee to the human.