13th March 2024 Humanoid robot can do chores and hold conversations AI startup company Figure, which emerged from stealth last year, has unveiled the latest upgrades to its Figure 01 humanoid robot. Founded in 2022 and publicly announced in March 2023, Figure is a California-based company with 80 employees that is building autonomous, general‑purpose humanoid robots. Its aim is to address labour shortages, fill jobs that are undesirable or unsafe for humans, and support a supply chain on a global scale. The company is backed by a number of tech leaders including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, chipmaker NVIDIA, and Microsoft, and it recently announced a deal with ChatGPT‑maker OpenAI. Figure's latest round of funding – which closed at $675 million – brought its total valuation to an impressive $2.6 billion. Previous videos have shown the company's Figure 01 robot performing tasks such as walking, making coffee, and carrying crates. According to Brett Adcock, founder and CEO, the machine achieved this by watching humans do the same chores and learning from them. An even more impressive demonstration has today been revealed. Figure 01 is now able to talk and hold conversations with people. It uses a combination of cameras and microphones to gather images and audio, which are fed into a large vision-language model (VLM) trained by OpenAI. Its neural network is then able to quickly plan future actions – manipulating objects with dexterous robotic hands – while also reflecting on its choices and explaining them in a synthetically generated voice. For many years, Boston Dynamics has been the clear leader in the world of advanced robotics. But with Figure 01 progressing so rapidly, it now appears to have some major competition. Everything seen here is in real time (1.0x speed), filmed continuously, and without any teleoperation by a human.
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