AI-powered robots learn to stand on their own two feet

A green, knee-high robot shuffled to the stage at the San Jose Convention Centre to cheers from an adoring crowd of nerds. Jensen Huang, founder of AI chip-maker Nvidia and one of the richest men in the world – net worth US$80 billion (NZ$133b) - beckoned the little droid closer.

“Come here, Green,” he said. “Stop wasting time.” Green did not move. Orange, an identical robot that had also ambled on stage, was more co-operative. It clomped over and stopped at Huang's command.

Green’s intransigence was a small fly in the ointment at the showcase conference of Huang's US$2.2 trillion chip giant. But his enthusiasm for this fantastical future was undimmed. It is a future where humanoid robots are moments away from bursting onto the world, powered by a novel operating system Nvidia has developed.

“Everything that moves in the future will be robotic,” he enthused. Indeed, before Green and Orange showed up, Huang strode on stage in front of a row of stationary humanoid robots, like a drill sergeant surveying his new recruits.

Since OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT 18 months ago, investors have ploughed an estimated US$100b into artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups. The AI age, it appears, has begun. But while the world has been transfixed by chatbots and tools that transform text prompts into jaw-dropping videos, a frenzy over robots powered by AI “brains” has taken hold that insiders claim is about to shock the world all over again.

“There are more than 30 companies I'm aware of developing humanoid robots with plans to commercialise in the next year,” Andra Keay, managing director of trade group Silicon Valley Robotics.

Doubters will guffaw at the idea that droids will soon flood into factories, fastfood kitchens and our homes. Two years ago, Elon Musk announced that Optimus, the humanoid robot being developed by Tesla, would be, “bigger than the car business”. In the event, Optimus ended up being a human dressed in a robot bodysuit, dancing on stage.

Green’s on-stage glitch last week could easily be painted as yet another example of why robots are still a very long way from being useful. Yet a growing number of investors are making huge bets that leaps in AI systems and plummeting component costs are converging with an acute labour shortage and rising wages to create the ideal conditions for the robots to finally arrive.

Figure AI, a two-year-old California start-up, raised US$675 million this month to commercialise its bipedal ’bot. Founder Brett Adcock predicted that human labour would soon be automated away entirely. “We are in the early stages of a revolution. From factories to farmland, the cost of labour will decrease until it becomes equivalent to renting a robot. We have the potential to improve millions of lives.”

For years, companies have had to train their robots to carry out tasks. Breakthroughs in AI, however, have led to models better able to understand the world around them, know what is asked of them, and responding accordingly.

Pras Velagapudi, chief architect of Agility Robotics, developer of a bipedal warehouse robot called Digit, said: “The newest AI models are very promising. We're going to see them out in the world much faster than we originally anticipated.”

Predictions of mass automation have been made countless times, only to fizzle. And there is something cartoonish about robots made to look and move like humans. But there are good reasons to try to replicate humans. US warehouse and manufacturers have more than 600,000 unfilled positions. Therein lies the allure of humanoid robots, which, theoretically, can be dropped into an existing industrial operation.

Dwight Klappich at tech consultancy Gartner warns that the path from a whizzy video to a truly capable robot is very long indeed – maybe 20 years. But after that time “you’ll go into a McDonald’s and it's going to look like Star Wars; there will be robots doing a lot of the work”.

Huang, Musk and the rest are betting that future will arrive even faster.