Gemini · Google · Tesla · Yann LeCun · Elon Musk · ChatGPT · MIT Technology Review
A robot shaped like a human—white with a black head and torso—has been popping up on video feeds
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Perhaps you’ve seen it dance or pass popcorn, put trash in a bin, vacuum, or press the button of a microwave.
Key facts
- World Labs, cofounded by the Stanford AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, raised $1 billion in funding in February and was acquired by AMD at the end of September for $8.2 billion
- According to Morgan Stanley, the number of robots that “resemble and act like humans” is likely to reach nearly 1 billion by 2050, creating a market worth over $5 trillion
- AMI Labs, cofounded by LeCun (formerly Meta’s chief AI scientist), also raised $1 billion in March
- To see one of the smartest robot brains working today, it’s worth looking at what Google DeepMind can do with a piece of equipment called ALOHA 2, short for “A Low-cost Open-source Hardware System for Bimanual Teleoperation
Summary
The story is a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Aventine, a non-profit research foundation that creates and supports content about how technology and science are changing the way they live. A robot shaped like a human—white with a black head and torso—has been popping up on video feeds. This would be Tesla’s Optimus, an AI-powered humanoid robot that Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, believes will be “not Tesla’s biggest product ever, but probably the biggest product ever,” headed to work on factory floors and, later, in their homes. Musk is not alone in his evangelism. Such proclamations are in large part fueled by the idea that the same AI advances behind tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude will enable a new generation of robots to imitate human movement the way chatbots imitate human language.