The green robot, standing at knee height, shuffled up to the stage of the San Jose Convention Center. A crowd of geeks cheered as it passed. Jensen Huang beckoned to the robot, the founder of AI chip maker Nvidia and one of the wealthiest men in the entire world with a net worth of $80 billion.
He said, “Come on here, Green.” “Stop wasting time.” Green didn’t move. Orange, a robot identical to the one that was also on stage, was much more cooperative. Huang ordered it to stop. It stopped and walked over.
Green’s apparent intransigence at Huang’s $2.2 trillion chip company’s showcase conference was a small blemish. His enthusiasm for the fantastical future remained unabated. In a futuristic world powered by Nvidia’s robotic operating system, bipedal humanoid machines are just moments away from taking over the planet. He proclaimed that “everything in the future, including humans, will be robotic”. It won’t be just you. In fact, before Green and Orange arrived, Huang stood on the stage in front a row humanoid robotics that were stationary, as a drill sergeant would do when assessing his new recruits.
Investors have invested an estimated $100 billion in artificial intelligence (AI). This is since OpenAI launched ChatGPT 18 months ago. It appears that the AI age has begun. While the world is transfixed by tools and chatbots that turn text into jaw-dropping video, insiders say that a frenzy has developed over robots powered with AI “brains”.
Andra Keay is an investor and the managing director of Silicon Valley Robotics. She compared the arrival of humanoid robotics to other revolutionary inventions, saying: “Humanoid Robots are the Automobiles of the 21st Century.”
Droids are coming to our factories, fast food kitchens, and homes. Elon Musk said two years ago that Optimus would be “bigger than car business” – the humanoid robotic being developed by Tesla. In the end, Optimus was a human wearing a robot suit who performed on stage.
Green’s stage glitch last week was another example that robots are a long way off from being useful. A growing number of investors make huge bets on the convergence of AI systems, falling component costs and a labour shortage to create ideal conditions for robots.
Figure AI, an two-year old Sunnyvale start-up in California, raised $675m to commercialise a bipedal robot this month. Brett Adcock predicted that the human workforce would be completely automated in a few years. He previously founded flying car company Archer Aviation. We are at the beginning stages of an AI- and robotics revolution. The cost of labour in factories and on farms will drop until it is equal to renting a robot. This will allow for a holistic, long-term reduction of costs. “As robots are able to build other robots, we may eventually be able to leave the human loop,” said he. “We can change the course of human history and improve the lives of millions.”
Since years, robots have been trained to perform discrete tasks like picking up an item and placing it on a desk. If you ask a robot to do something like grab a hairbrush or walk through a warehouse, they will be useless. AI breakthroughs have enabled AI-based reasoning systems that can better understand the world, what they are asked to do, and respond accordingly.
Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure AI, recently announced a new partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI in order to integrate its artificial intelligence system into humanoid robotic bodies
Pras Velagapudi is the chief architect at Agility Robotics. The company developed a bipedal warehouse robotic called Digit. He said that “the newest AI models show great promise in solving some of these upcoming problems, which we thought would take many years to solve.” We will see these robots in the world faster than originally expected.
Many predictions of mass automation were made, but they never came true. It’s almost comical to see robots made to move and look like humans. Henry Ford’s famous quote: “If I asked people what they want, they would say faster horses.”
There are many reasons why we should try to duplicate humans. More than 600,000 positions are unfilled in American manufacturing and warehouse companies. Many have resisted automation despite the fact that it is necessary. This is because it requires an entire re-design of an operation to accommodate even a small amount of automated work.
Humanoid robots are a fascinating concept. They are a facsimile of humans, in terms of size, shape, and locomotion. Therefore, they do not require a complex retrofit. Theoretically, a capable droid could be dropped into a current operation.
One might think the robot age has already arrived if they were to scan YouTube demo videos. Figure posted a video of its bot powered by OpenAI’s language model that demonstrated an impressive ability to comprehend the world around it. It gave its interlocutor a piece of fruit when asked what to eat. It was also dextrous in its response to voice commands, picking up trash and stacking (plastic) plates on a drying rack. Tesla released a video of Optimus’ latest version in December, which was 30 percent faster than its previous model. China’s Unitree showed its bots climbing and running up stairs.
Dwight Klappich is a tech consultant at Gartner. He’s more circumspect. It is a long way from a video of a robot to one that can operate in real life, with all its variables. In the next 20 to 30 years, a McDonald’s will look like Star Wars. Robots will do a lot of work.
Huang, Musk, and others bet that the future will come much faster.