Having disrupted the white-collar jobs, OpenAI is now looking to automate blue-collar jobs. The company wants to develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots and aims to help accelerate their capabilities to process and reason from language.
OpenAI’s investment in Figure, alongside major players like Microsoft, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), and others, reinforces this. This development also posed a threat to Elon Musk’s Tesla Optimus, which explains why he might have sued OpenAI to begin with in the first place.
In an interview with Bill Gates, Sam Altman said that seven to six years ago, the prediction was that AI would impact blue-collar work first, white-collar work second, and creativity maybe never, but certainly last because that was considered ‘magic and human.’ “Obviously, it’s gone in exactly the other direction,” he quipped.
He is quite optimistic about the future of robotics. “On the physical hardware side, there’s finally, for the first time that I’ve ever seen, really exciting new platforms being built,”said Altman.
He added that, at some point, they will be able to use their AI models, along with their language understanding and video understanding, to accomplish amazing things with robots.
Interestingly, Figure’s mission fits well with Altman’s, which is to make versatile humanoids that can tackle labor shortages, automate less desirable jobs, and enhance human capabilities and productivity.
“We have a massive labor crisis happening, with 10+ million jobs in the U.S. that people don’t want to do,” said Figure Chief Brett Adcock, adding that companies are losing 50% to 150% of employees annually and can’t find anybody to do these jobs.
“They simply don’t know a solution to help automate these problems. We believe that with Figure, the demand for what we’re doing is almost unbounded. I would say we’re aiming to be one of the first in the world to deploy us at a real scale commercially.”
The robotics company released updates for the Figure-01 humanoid earlier this year, where the robot demonstrates making coffee—a skill learned from observing humans. ‘If it’s not obvious yet, Figure’s humanoid robot is the ultimate deployment vector for AGI,’ wrote Adcock on X.
OpenAI Robotics Journey
This isn’t the first time OpenAI has ventured into robotics. In 2019, OpenAI successfully trained a robotic hand to autonomously solve a Rubik’s cube. Despite this achievement, the dedicated robotics team was disbanded in July 2021. Additionally, the company had previously invested USD 23.5 million in 1X Technologies.
“We started robots too early, so we had to put that project on hold. We were dealing with bad simulators and breaking tendons and things like that,” said Altman, adding over time they realised that they first needed intelligence and cognition and later they could figure out how to adapt it to physicality.
Even Sora, OpenAI’s latest text-to-video generation model, can simulate some aspects of people, animals, and environments from the physical world when trained at scale. While the rest of the world sees Sora as just a video generation tool, for OpenAI, it is an attempt to create a simulated reality that could lead to AGI.
Simply put, the idea is to create a world model, similar to what Meta’s chief, Yann LeCun, and the autonomous vehicle company Wavye are trying to achieve.
“We’ve always planned to come back to robotics and we see a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models,” said Peter Welinder, VP of Product and Partnerships at OpenAI.
“AGI will eventually be embodied in some robotic form, whether it’s Optimus (Tesla), Figure (with OpenAI), or another company (seems like there’s a lot),” wrote Sully co-founder CognosysAi.
Makes Optimus Jealous
Both Optimus and Figure aren’t that much different from each other. Figure 01 stands at 5’6” and weighs 60 kg, while Optimus is slightly taller at 5’8” and weighs 73 kg. Both can handle a payload of up to 20 kg, showcasing their comparable sizes.
Meanwhile, Tesla recently announced major improvements in its humanoid robots and it looks like it is moving closer to what Musk has envisioned for Optimus. Last year, Optimus just waved on the stage. Now, it can pick up and sort objects, do yoga, and navigate through surroundings.
Besides Figure and Optimus, Boston Dynamics is also not left behind. The company has two robots- Atlas (bipedal) and Spot(quadruped which are both used in various industries, including logistics, manufacturing, construction, and inspection.
“Boston Dynamics is now primarily owned by Hyundai. I believe that Hyundai’s expertise in making cars can be applied to the production of robots, resulting in products that are both less expensive and more reliable,” said Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics.
Of late, Amazon too has been experimenting with humanoid robots in select US warehouses, marking a significant step in its automation endeavours. The tech giant aims to optimise efficiency by introducing these robots, named ‘Digit’, which emulate human movements for tasks such as moving and handling items.
The prospect of a world where humans are liberated from routine jobs doesn’t seem too bad. Who knows, the future job wars will likely involve humanoids more and humans less.
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