According to reports from Zhitrust Financial News APP, many technology industry leaders including OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon founder Bezos have invested heavily in Figure AI, a startup company for AI humanoid robots, and supported the company's launch of its latest humanoid robot, Figure 02. As the name implies, this is the successor to Figure 01, which was released in 2023, and is currently the most advanced humanoid robot available. This new humanoid robot has fully integrated the multimodal AI model developed by OpenAI, which is widely regarded in the tech industry as a "walking ChatGPT" with powerful abilities to mimic human behavior, deep learning, thinking, and natural and efficient communication with humans.

According to Figure AI, this is the most powerful and comprehensive humanoid robot the company has ever released and combines the flexibility of the human body with the most advanced artificial intelligence model from OpenAI. This humanoid robot's powerful abilities in mimicry and deep learning mean that it can accurately perform various complex and dangerous tasks in enterprise production and manufacturing activities, and play a more intelligent role in assisting humans to improve production efficiency. In the near future, it is expected to fully penetrate households and become a consumer electronics product with a popularity rate comparable to that of iPhones and iPads.

According to some technology industry researchers, the release of Figure AI's second generation humanoid robot, Figure 02, may mean that human society is gradually entering the age of "smart machines." The "smart machine age" generally refers to an era in which AI humanoid robots and artificial intelligence technology are widely used and popularized in human society.

Many works of science fiction and film have predicted the arrival of the "smart machine age" in the near future. In this era, AI humanoid robots will be able to make decisions, learn and adapt to complex environments autonomously, engage in natural and efficient communication with humans, and accurately complete many production and manufacturing activities, thereby replacing or assisting human work in many fields. This technological progression may have a positive and far-reaching impact on economic growth and human society's productivity.

The timeline for the widespread release of Figure 02 has not been announced, but according to Figure AI's latest introduction, "The Figure robot perfectly combines the flexibility of the human form with advanced artificial intelligence technology and will execute a variety of tasks in business applications and in the home in the near future."

Figure 02, which incorporates the OpenAI model, can be called the "strongest edge AI."

Undoubtedly, the most eye-catching update function of Figure 02 is the complete integration of the multimodal model from OpenAI achieved through long-term cooperation. In February, OpenAI helped Figure raise about $675 million in Series B financing, bringing the startup's valuation to $2.6 billion at that time.

The advent of the AI model has historical significance for the entire robotics industry, and humanoid robot developers are particularly interested in this technology. One of the main selling points of this design is its ability to communicate efficiently and work alongside human colleagues in factory workshops -- of course, under appropriate safety measures. Figure 02 has deep learning and mimicry abilities based on the OpenAI model, as well as speakers and microphones for normal conversation in the workplace.

Multi-modal models such as OpenAI GPT-4o and Google Gemini are highly regarded for their incredibly powerful natural language abilities and efficient problem-solving capabilities, opening up a new horizon in the field of intelligent assistants and chatbots. Equipping these functions for humanoid robot systems is an obvious trend: it helps humans to easily guide the robots, and the robots can respond instantly like humans with just one sentence or action, while also increasing transparency for what the robot is doing at any given time.

When the deployment scale of the AI chip for servers dealing with massive parallel computing reaches the basic calculation requirements and basic performance support, according to the development trend of recent years, AI models will eventually be integrated into these terminals, including consumer electronics such as smartphones and humanoid robots, as well as applications terminals such as electric vehicle software systems and industrial production. Figure AI's launch of Figure 02 can be called the "strongest edge AI" seen so far.

Compared with cloud-based AI, edge AI with significant advantages such as high efficiency, fast response, and personalization better meets the actual needs of consumers, and this will inevitably lead to a surge in demand for reasoning chips. Compared to AI training, the AI reasoning domain has far less GPU parallel computing requirements for "data bombardment" applications. The reasoning process involves applying pre-trained models to make decisions or identification, and CPU-based central processing units (CPUs) that are extremely adept at complex logic processing tasks and control flow tasks are sufficient to efficiently schedule and process many reasoning scenarios.

In this work of integrating AI into humanoid robots, Figure is certainly not fighting alone. Last year, robotics company Agility showcased the work it has been doing, which is to use generative AI to significantly improve the efficiency of communication between humans and robots. The use of neural networks was a key project of the Google Everyday Robots team before it closed down. At the same time, Tesla CEO Musk's Grok AI and Optimus (Transformers humanoid robots) will undoubtedly be connected sooner or later.

OpenAI is certainly very active in the field of humanoid robots. Before investing in Figure AI, the company invested in Norwegian humanoid robot company 1X. But there is no doubt that Figure AI, which has been popular worldwide in the past year thanks to its impressive robot appearance, flexible walking pace and powerful imitation and learning abilities, is the most active in the humanoid robot industry. Other top technology companies investing in Figure AI include Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Intel.

Figure AI has recently started a pilot project with BMW for automobile manufacturing. In June, the company released a video showing early robots autonomously performing tasks on the floor with the help of neural network systems. The company pointed out that the Figure 02 robot has visited an automobile manufacturer's factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for imitation, training, and data collection.

Cooperation between humanoid robot manufacturers and automobile manufacturers has become more frequent recently. Agility, Apptronik, and Sanctuary AI have announced similar pilot projects with auto manufacturers. Tesla CEO Musk has always considered the Transformers humanoid robot as a key factor in improving Tesla's auto production capacity, while the owner of Boston Dynamics, Hyundai, has set his sights on Boston Dynamics' proprietary humanoid robots.

The ability to communicate with humans is an important part of the "bottom-up hardware and software redesign" that Figure refers to between 01 and 02. This list also includes six RGB cameras and an onboard visual language model, combined with improved CPU/GPU hardware and increasingly flexible robot arms similar to humans.

"Father of AI" Huang Renxun: the next wave of AI will focus on robotics technology.

With the emergence of OpenAI's Wen Sheng video AI model Sora, which can understand and simulate the physical world of motion, the more powerful physical world modeling capability and more comprehensive multimodal standard-based reasoning ability of AI models may promote the prosperity and development of the humanoid robot industry.

Huang Renxun, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, who has the title of "father of AI", recently said: "The next wave of AI will focus on robotics, one of the most exciting developments is humanoid robots." "We are promoting the entire NVIDIA robot technology stack, opening up technology platform access for global humanoid robot developers and companies, and using the most suitable platform, acceleration library, and AI model for their needs."

In recent years, Nvidia has focused its R&D work and R&D spending on the field of humanoid robots, firmly believing that humanoid robots will be the core application scenario of AI technology. Nvidia announced at the end of July that it will provide a set of services, models, and robot computing platforms for the world's leading humanoid robot developers, AI model developers, and software manufacturers to develop, train, and build the next generation of humanoid robots.

Nvidia's new series of service products include the new NVIDIA NIM microservices and framework for humanoid robot simulation and deep learning, the NVIDIA OSMO orchestration service for running multi-stage humanoid robot massive workloads, and remote operation workflows that support new AI technology and humanoid robot simulation, allowing developers to use a small amount of human real demonstration data to train humanoid robots.

According to reports, Nvidia's new NIM microservice provides pre-built containers supported by powerful inference computing software from NVIDIA, enabling humanoid robot developers to reduce the deployment time of robot simulation schemes from several weeks to just a few minutes. Two new Nvidia AI microservices released will allow robot development experts to enhance the simulation workflow of generative physics AI in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a reference application for robot simulation projects based on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform.

A recent report by Markets And Markets shows that the global humanoid robot market is expected to be only about 1.8 billion US dollars in 2023, and it is expected to expand rapidly to 13.8 billion US dollars by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 50%. Musk said at the Tesla shareholders meeting in June that the Transformers humanoid robot could become the core catalyst for Tesla's market cap to rise to 25 trillion US dollars.

In July, Musk emphasized at the Tesla earnings conference call that the Optimus humanoid robot will start production next year. He expects that by 2025, thousands of Optimus humanoid robots will perform important production tasks for the company, and the second version is expected to be sold to external companies by 2026. In the future, "Transformers humanoid robots" will also become Tesla's core revenue-generating tool like Robotaxi.