Figure becomes a $2.6B humanoid robotics startup - Weekly News Roundup - Issue #456
Figure becomes a $2.6B humanoid robotics startup - Weekly News Roundup - Issue #456
Plus: Elon Musk sues OpenAI; Google's AI makes games from text; Mistral Large; Xiaomi CyberDog 2; the first AI virus is here; and more!
Welcome to Weekly News Roundup Issue #456. This week, I’d like to highlight Figure, a humanoid robotics startup that secured $675 million in Series B funding this week, reaching a valuation of $2.6 billion.
In other news, Elon Musk sues OpenAI for putting profit before humanity. Elsewhere in AI, Google DeepMind shows a text-to-game model, Mistral releases a model that ranks second only to GPT-4 and researchers have created the first AI virus. I hope you’ll enjoy this week’s issue!
Something interesting is happening in humanoid robotics. It seems like out of nowhere an entire cohort of humanoid robotics companies emerged, each promising to make the sci-fi dreams of humanoid robots a reality.
One of those companies is Figure, founded in 2022. It remained under the radar for about a year until almost exactly a year ago, when the company made its debut with a YouTube video, announcing its ambitious goal to build an autonomous, general-purpose humanoid robot. A couple of months later, Figure released a video showcasing Figure 01 walking. At the beginning of this year, the team demonstrated that their robot had learned how to operate a coffee machine.
Currently, Figure has a team of over 80 engineers who previously worked at such companies as Boston Dynamics, Toyota Research Institute, the Institute for Human Machine Cognition, Agility Robotics, Google, and Apple. Many of them are experienced roboticists who worked on humanoid robots before.
This week, Figure announced a massive $675 million in Series B funding, with investments from Microsoft, the OpenAI Startup Fund, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest. With this investment round, Figure's valuation has reached $2.6 billion. For comparison, Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics in 2020 for $1.1 billion.
According to the announcement, the newly secured funds will be used to accelerate Figure’s timeline for deploying commercial humanoid robots. The funds will also be used for AI training, manufacturing, deploying more robots and hiring more engineers.
Another thing Figure announced was the signing of a collaboration agreement with OpenAI to develop next-generation AI models for humanoid robots. With the help of OpenAI, Figure hopes to accelerate the commercial deployment of its robots capable of understanding language and reasoning. OpenAI is today best known for GPT-4 and other AI models like DALL·E and the recently announced text-to-video generator Sora. But before the company entered the public stage by storm with ChatGPT, OpenAI was working on applying AI to robotics. One of OpenAI’s technical goals is still to build a household robot. With this in mind, the involvement of OpenAI makes more sense. It is also worth noting that OpenAI has previously invested in another humanoid robot startup 1X in 2023.
Alongside the investment announcement, Figure also shared a video showing Figure 01 autonomously moving a box from one place to another place. If you are interested in learning more about the video, IEEE Spectrum interviewed Jenna Reher, Senior Robotics/AI Engineer at Figure and asked her what the company mean by “autonomous” and why there is a tether attached to the robot.
As I mentioned at the beginning, Figure is just one of the many companies working on humanoid robots that emerged in the last few years. Other companies in this cohort include Tesla, 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, Sanctuary AI, Apptronik, Fourier Intelligence and Unitree. Some of them are being currently tested. Figure has entered into a commercial agreement with BMW to bring its humanoid robots into BMW’s manufacturing facility in South Carolina and Agility Robotics’ Digit is being tested at Amazon. Others are still in development but should soon be put to the test in real-life scenarios. In any case, the second half of this decade shapes to be where humanoid robots leave the realm of science fiction and start to enter factories or warehouses to work alongside humans.
It is an interesting time for robotics. The advancements in mechanical engineering, better materials, better batteries and better components converge with the development of powerful AI models and machine learning techniques. What we see today with humanoid robots is a sign of a bigger movement in robotics which will bring more capable and intelligent machines soon into our workplaces and lives.
If you enjoy this post, please click the ❤️ button or share it.
Do you like my work? Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support it
For those who prefer to make a one-off donation, you can 'buy me a coffee' via Ko-fi. Every coffee bought is a generous support towards the work put into this newsletter.
Your support, in any form, is deeply appreciated and goes a long way in keeping this newsletter alive and thriving.
🦾 More than a human
“The Kardashian Of Longevity”: Is Bryan Johnson Good For The Nascent Longevity Biotechnology Industry?
Since January 2023, Bryan Johnson, a billionaire entrepreneur, has become famous for his quest to reverse ageing for which he is spending $2 million a year. In this article, Alex Zhavoronkov, founder of InSilico Medicine and a respected expert in longevity, takes a closer look at Johnson’s actions and whether they are a good thing for the longevity movement as a whole.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
Mistral Large
Mistral AI, a French AI startup, has released its latest model, called Mistral Large. According to Mistral, the new model is second only to GPT-4 and offers top-tier reasoning capacities. The new model is available on Azure, Mistral’s La Plateforme service or self-deployed. However, unlike other Mistral’s models like Mistral-7B or Mixtral, Mistral Large is not open source. The French startup also announced an investment of $16 million from Microsoft, bringing the value of the company which is not even a year old to about $2 billion.
Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario–like games from scratch
Google DeepMind released Genie, a new generative AI model that can simple inputs like text descriptions, sketches, or photos into playable 2D platformer games, albeit currently at a slow frame rate. Unlike previous models that relied on detailed tagging of video with input actions, Genie was trained on video footage alone, simplifying the creation process and expanding potential training data. Genie is still a research project but it hints at future applications in game development, virtual AI training, and robotics, showcasing the potential of AI in creating interactive environments.
Elon Musk sues OpenAI accusing it of putting profit before humanity
Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching OpenAI's foundational mission by prioritizing the pursuit of profit over the benefit of humanity. “OpenAI Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source, de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximise profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” the lawsuit alleges.
What lengths will Chinese companies go to get an NVIDIA A100 chip?
Nvidia’s high-end GPUs are currently one of the most sought-after products on the planet. Big tech companies fight with each other to get as much of them as possible. The same story is in China and the US export bans on advanced electronics to China make these GPUs even more valuable.
Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people after it laid off 700 people
Klarna, a Swedish buy-now, pay-later company, has gone all-in into AI chatbots for customer service. The company has reported the chatbots have handled some 2.3 million conversations so far and are earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents. Klarna also said the chatbots do the work of 700 people, the same number of workers who were laid off in mid-2022. The company denies any connection between these two numbers.
Here Come the AI Worms
Security researchers have created what they think is the first generative AI worms, which can spread from one system to another to steal data or to deploy malware software. Named Morris II, in honour of the first computer virus, the worm can attack a generative AI email assistant to steal data from emails and send spam messages—breaking some security protections in ChatGPT and Gemini in the process. The tests have been conducted in a controlled environment and no AI worm has been spotted yet in the wild. However, the existence of Morris II sends a signal to AI developers to take the security of their systems seriously.
If you're enjoying the insights and perspectives shared in the Humanity Redefined newsletter, why not spread the word?
🤖 Robotics
▶️ Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics (1:43:46)
I really enjoyed this conversation Lex Fridman had with Marc Raibert, founder and former long-time CEO of Boston Dynamics, and recently Executive Director of the newly-created Boston Dynamics AI Institute. It starts with what got Raibert into robotics and then spans his entire career, from MIT Leg Lab to where Boston Dynamics is now. It is a story of engineering, robotics, building a world-class team and doing the impossible, because why not?
Xiaomi unveils CyberDog 2 robot, boasts fusion sensing, decision-making system
At the Mobile World Congress, Xiaomi introduced the CyberDog 2, the newest version of the company’s robot dog. This lighter, more agile robot features enhanced mobility through advanced sensors and micromotors and an AI system for autonomous learning and interaction. CyberDog 2 is built on an open-source platform to enable and encourage developers to extend the robot’s abilities.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please click the ❤️ button or share it.
Humanity Redefined sheds light on the bleeding edge of technology and how advancements in AI, robotics, and biotech can usher in abundance, expand humanity's horizons, and redefine what it means to be human.
A big thank you to my paid subscribers, to my Patrons: whmr, Florian, dux, Eric, Preppikoma and Andrew, and to everyone who supports my work on Ko-Fi. Thank you for the support!