ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is looking to fuse its artificial intelligence systems into the bodies of humanoid robots as part of a new deal with robotics startup Figure.
Sunnyvale, California-based Figure announced the partnership Thursday along with $675 million in venture capital funding from a group that includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as well as Microsoft, chipmaker Nvidia and the startup-funding divisions of Intel and OpenAI.
Figure is less than two years old and doesn’t have a commercial product but is persuading influential tech industry backers to support its vision of shipping billions of humanlike robots to the world’s workplaces and homes.
“If we can just get humanoids to do work that humans are not wanting to do because there’s a shortfall of humans, we can sell millions of humanoids, billions maybe,” Figure CEO Brett Adcock told the Associated Press last year.
For OpenAI, which dabbled in robotics research before pivoting to a focus on the AI large language models that power ChatGPT, the partnership will “open up new possibilities for how robots can help in everyday life,” said Peter Welinder, the San Francisco company’s vice president of product and partnerships, in a written statement.
Financial terms of the deal between Figure and OpenAI weren’t disclosed. The collaboration will have OpenAI building specialized AI models for Figure’s humanoid robots, likely based on OpenAI’s existing technology, such as GPT language models, the image-generator DALL-E, and the new video-generator Sora.
That will help “accelerate Figure’s commercial timeline” by enabling its robots to “process and reason from language,” according to Figure’s announcement. The company announced in January an agreement with BMW to put its robots to work at a car plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but hadn’t yet determined exactly how or when they would be used.
