Meanwhile, OpenAI has signaled it's getting interested in humanoids again as well. OpenAI wants to create an "artificial general intelligence" or AGI – a machine that can do nearly all tasks better than a human. Through the GPT language model, the company expects to knock a lot off that list in the short term future, but it'll need to put its intelligence in a body to handle the rest.
OpenAI had its own robotics division for many years, and indeed built a humanoid hand capable of fine manipulation and sensing that used neural networks and reinforcement learning to figure out how to solve a Rubik's cube, one-handed.
But the company
shut down its robotics team in 2021, telling VentureBeat that it was focusing its efforts in the area where it was progressing fastest – generative AI and large language models like GPT. The key difference, according to co-founder Wojciech Zaremba, is data and computing power. The AI-powered robots proved capable of learning physical tasks "extremely well" – there's just far more text training data than robot-relevant video data, and text is much faster for a neural model to process.
So text is where they focused their efforts, and the results are hard to argue with; OpenAI now has the fastest-growing platform in history, a game-changing breakthrough of the highest order in the GPT language model.
But through an investment in Norwegian company 1X, formerly known as Halodi Robotics, it seems OpenAI is ready to get back into embodied intelligence. Details are scant at this point; 1X announced the close of a
US$23.5 million Series A2 funding roundon March 23rd, led by the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Halodi made a certain amount of progress with its
Eve robot, a humanoid on a wheeled base, a version of which can be seen in the video above. But a wheeled robot is a limited one, in terms of the human tasks it can take over, and 1X is now focused on a bipedal platform called Neo, to "explore how artificial intelligence can take form in a human-like body."
It looks somewhat similar to Figure's design, in that it appears to use electric actuators rather than hydraulics, it runs a screen for a face, and it uses humanoid hands.
The company has little more to say at this point, other than the words "Summer 2023," which appears to indicate we'll be meeting Neo-on-legs very soon. It'll be fascinating to see what OpenAI's contributions will bring to a project like this.
This space could well become the next high-tech gold rush, since as both Tesla and Figure point out, whoever gets a general-purpose humanoid out there first, that's capable of doing real work across a decently broad set of tasks, is in an amazing position to generate near-unlimited money and value.
