When we ask ourselves in a few years when artificial intelligence really started changing our lives forever, perhaps we won’t say “when ChatGPT launched,” on November 30, 2022. Maybe we will say “when ChatGPT entered the body of a robot”. It happened a few days ago in the United States, and the video that tells of this moment is one of the most sensational things I’ve seen in the technological field.
For the first time we understood that with a robot we will be able to talk like we talk to a friend and we won’t need to give him precise instructions, but we will just need to express a wish and he will try to grant it, understanding the situation. The humanoid robot is called Figure 01, and FigureAI is the name of the startup that created it: it was founded a couple of years ago by a brilliant thirty-year-old who some are already calling the new Elon Musk. His name is Brett Adcock, was born 38 years ago into a farming family in Illinois, and had shown a talent for tech ventures already in middle school, it seems; after graduation he launches a couple of startups but it is the third that is successful, he soon sells it for around 100 million dollars. He then decides to found a fourth, which aims to create electric vertical take-off aircraft, drones to fly above urban traffic: he also leaves this company after 4 years when is worth almost 3 billion dollars because he decides he wants to combine robotics and AI by creating humanoids that can live and work with us.
To do this, it hires a few dozen of the best experts in the world and closes a few months ago investment round of over 600 million of dollars, convincing Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman among others. Finally the agreement with ChatGPT and within a couple of weeks the debut of Figure 01: you can see it behind a table on which there is a plate, a glass, an apple and a drainer. “Give me something to eat,” Adcock says to the robot and it takes the apple and hands it to him. “It was the only edible thing” he will say later, in a voice so human it makes an impression: in dialogue he hesitates, even stammers, changes intonation based on the speech. Now Figure 01 will debut on the assembly line of a large automotive company alongside the workers. And it’s just the beginning. This time the future has really arrived.