Microsoft, it appears, is hedging its bets in the case of general-purpose robotics AI. At the tip of February, the Windows maker spearheaded an enormous $675 million Series B in Bay Area-based Figure. Today, the tech large introduced a collaboration with Figure competitor Sanctuary AI, finest recognized for its humanoid robotic, Phoenix.
The Sanctuary partnership actually will get to the guts of Microsoft’s curiosity within the class: synthetic normal intelligence. It’s an idea that comes up rather a lot when discussing humanoid robots — too usually, I’d argue, given the state of issues. While such breakthroughs are seemingly a number of years off (a minimum of), they’re required for humanoid robots to succeed in the lengthy promised “general-purpose status.”
In essence, which means robots that may study and purpose like people. That represents a possible quantum leap for robotic capabilities, which have historically been restricted to at least one or two duties. The humanoid type issue opens these programs to a far broader vary of movement than single-purpose programs, however they may in the end want the intelligence to match.
“Creating systems that think like, and understand us, is one of the biggest civilization-level technical problems and opportunities that we will ever face,” Sanctuary co-founder and CEO Geordie Rose notes. “A challenge like this requires the best global minds to work together. We’re excited to be working with Microsoft to unlock the next generation of AI models that will power general-purpose robots.”
Such a partnership deepens Microsoft’s dedication to AI improvement and delivers a companion who can design {hardware} to these specs. Sanctuary has been working within the area for a while now, and not too long ago scored a pilot partnership with Magna, which is able to deliver the newest model of Phoenix to automobile crops.
All informed, Sanctuary robots “have been tested across 400 customer-defined tasks across 15 different industries.” Of course, we’re nonetheless within the very early phases of all of this.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke about his personal curiosity in humanoids earlier this yr. Neither Sanctuary nor Figure acquired a point out, although he did spend a while discussing opponents Agility and Apptronik.
Microsoft isn’t alone in hedging its bets within the class. OpenAI (one other Microsoft companion) has made its personal investments in each Figure and competitor 1X.
