Figure’s humanoid can now watch, study and carry out duties autonomously

Figure’s Brett Adcock claimed a “ChatGPT second” for humanoid robotics on the weekend. Now, we all know what he means: the robotic can now watch people doing duties, construct its personal understanding of the best way to do them, and begin doing them completely autonomously.

General-purpose humanoid robots might want to deal with all kinds of jobs. They’ll want to grasp all of the instruments and units, objects, methods and goals we people use to get issues completed, they usually’ll must be as versatile and adaptable as we’re in an unlimited vary of dynamic working environments.

They’re not going to be helpful in the event that they want a crew of programmers telling them the best way to do each new job; they want to have the ability to watch and study – and multimodal AIs able to watching and decoding video, then driving robotics to copy what they see, have been taking revolutionary strides in current months, as evidenced by Toyota’s unimaginable “giant habits mannequin” demonstration in September.

But Toyota is utilizing bench-based robotic arms, in a analysis heart. Figure, like Tesla, Agility, and a rising variety of different firms, is laser-focused on self-sufficient full-body humanoids that may theoretically go into any office and finally study to take over any human job. And these should not analysis packages, these firms need merchandise on the market available in the market yesterday, beginning to pay their manner and get helpful work completed.

Figure

Adcock informed us he hoped to have the 01 robotic deployed and demonstrating helpful work round Figure’s personal premises by the top of 2023 – and whereas that does not appear to have transpired at this level, a watch-and-learn functionality in a humanoid is certainly huge information.

The demonstration in query, thoughts you, is just not probably the most Earth-shatteringly spectacular job; the Figure robotic is proven working a Keurig espresso machine, with a cup already in it. It responds to a verbal command, opens the highest hatch, pops a espresso pod in, closes the hatch and presses the button, and lets the man who requested for the espresso seize the total cup out of the machine himself. Check it out:

So sure, it is truthful to say the human and the Keurig machine are nonetheless performing some heavy lifting right here – however that is not the purpose. The level is, the Figure robotic took 10 hours to review video, and may now do a factor by itself. It’s added a brand new autonomous motion to its library, transferrable to some other Figure robotic operating on the identical system through swarm studying.

If that studying course of is strong throughout a broad vary of various duties, then there is no cause why we should not begin seeing a brand new video like this each different day, because the 01 learns to do every little thing from peeling bananas, to placing pages in a hoop binder, to screwing jar lids on and off, to utilizing spanners, drills, angle grinders and screwdrivers.

It should not be lengthy earlier than it may possibly go discover a cup within the kitchen, examine that the Keurig’s plugged in and has loads of water in it, make the rattling press-button espresso, and produce it to your desk with out spilling it – a posh job making use of its strolling capabilities and Large Language Model AI’s capacity to interrupt issues down into actionable steps.

So do not get hung up on the espresso; watch this house. If Figure’s robotic actually is aware of the best way to watch and study now, we’ll really feel a critical jolt of acceleration within the wild frontier of business humanoid robotics as 2024 begins to get underway. And even when Figure is overselling its capabilities – not that any tech startup would dream of doing such a factor – it ain’t gonna be lengthy, and there is a couple dozen different groups manically racing to ship robots with these capabilities. This is going on.

Make no mistake: humanoid robots stand to be a fully revolutionary expertise as soon as they’re deployed at scale, able to essentially altering the world in methods not even Adcock and the opposite leaders on this discipline can predict. The meteoric rise of GPT and different language mannequin AIs has made it clear that human intelligence will not be all that particular for very lengthy, and the parallel rise of the humanoids is completely designed to place an finish to human labor.

Things are taking place proper now that may’ve been completely unthinkable even 5 years in the past. We seem like proper on the tipping level of a technological and societal upheaval greater than the agricultural or industrial revolutions, that might unlock a world of unimaginable ease and lots, and/or presumably relegate 95% of people to the standing of zoo animals or home vegetation.

How are you feeling about all this, of us? Personally, I’m slightly wigged out. My eyebrows can solely go so excessive, they usually’ve been there for a great whereas now. I’m getting new brow wrinkles.

Source: Figure