On February 5, Brett Adcock, founder of the American humanoid robot startup Figure, announced on social media that he had withdrawn from the cooperation agreement with OpenAI. He said that Figure had made a major breakthrough in the end-to-end robot AI that was completely independently developed, and promised to "show something that has never been seen in a humanoid robot" in the next 30 days, but kept silent about the specific details.
On January 31, Brett Adcock said on social media, "Figure signed a second commercial customer and saw the potential to deliver 100,000 humanoid robots."
OpenAI bet on the humanoid robot track and invested in Norwegian robot startup X1 and American humanoid robot startup Figure. OpenAI has been a long-term investor in Figure, and the two companies announced an agreement last year to jointly develop artificial intelligence models for the next generation of humanoid robots. Last August, the two companies announced that the Figure 02 humanoid robot would use OpenAI's model for natural language communication.
According to the technology media TechCrunch, Adcock said that the key issue of cooperation lies in integration. OpenAI is a large company with a large business scope and corresponding intelligent models. Embedding artificial intelligence into embodied intelligence of entities such as robots is not the focus of this ChatGPT maker. Adcock believes that the right solution is to build an end-to-end artificial intelligence model to power specific hardware.
"We found that to solve embodied intelligence on a large scale in the real world, robot AI must be vertically integrated." Adcock said, "We can't outsource artificial intelligence, just as we can't outsource hardware."
Founded in 2022, Figure has raised $1.5 billion so far, and the software and hardware teams have expanded rapidly. Adcock believes that humanoid robots are in the "iPhone era" of robots. Robots will help make more robots, which will wash clothes and make coffee for humans in the real world, and it will bring a world of abundance. Adcock said that there are two major focuses within Figure, namely the commercial market and the family. The strategy in terms of business is to continue to focus on a few customers. In the early stages of development, vertical development among a few customers is more effective than dispersing among a large number of customers.
"A year ago, we signed our first commercial customer, BMW, and now we have a group of robots performing end-to-end operations." Adcock said that in addition to working in BMW's factory, Figure's latest customer is one of the largest companies in the United States, which brings Figure shipment potential, promotes the reduction of robot costs and collects artificial intelligence data. "Among these two customers, the number of robots will reach 100,000 in the next four years."
At the same time, OpenAI is also planning its robotics business. In December last year, people familiar with the matter told the media that OpenAI was considering building its own humanoid robot. In January this year, Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, forwarded a message on social media that OpenAI was recruiting hardware engineers. At that time, Caitlin Kalinowski, head of hardware at OpenAI, said on social media that OpenAI was reorganizing its robotics department and was recruiting electrical engineering sensor engineers, robot mechanical design engineers, etc.
Recently, OpenAI also submitted a trademark application involving humanoid robots to the US Patent and Trademark Office. The document mentioned "user-programmable humanoid robots" and "humanoid robots with communication and learning functions." However, an IP application is not a guarantee of future products.