Despite reports of enterprises getting cold feet around embracing generative AI due to cost and accuracy issues, it’s clear that in the world of robotics, the AI age is just starting to take off.
Today, Figure, a robotics startup valued at $2.6 billion, founded less than two years ago by former workers at Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Archer Aviation, showed off its first collaboration with new investor and partner OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and it is undeniably impressive.
Figure co-founder and CEO Brett Adcock took to his account on the social platform Xto post a video demo of a Figure full-sized humanoid robot, the Figure 01 (pronounced “Figure One”), demonstrating its capabilities to interact with a nearby human and its environment, showing the robot following the person’s orders, locating and handing them an object (an apple, in this case), describing what it’s doing and conversing with the person (albeit with slightly delayed reaction time from what we would expect in a typical human-to-human conversation), and identifying, planning and carrying out helpful tasks on its own (in this case, picking up trash and putting dishes into a drying rack).
