Silicon Valley is built around the personal stories of entrepreneurs and, as such, loves the rivalries between these iconic personalities. The story of OpenAI, editor of the GTP-3 and 4 extended language models and of ChatGPT, is the perfect example. The nonprofit was launched in 2015 to much fanfare with the backing of billionaires like Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman, who collectively pledged $1 billion in donations. This had prompted some of the best minds in the field to leave big tech companies and universities to join the initiative.
But at the beginning of 2018, Musk wanted to take control of the initiative to restructure it, considering that OpenAI was inevitably falling behind Google Brain. Several OpenAI founders opposed Musk’s takeover and Sam Altman, another co-founder who then ran the powerful start-up accelerator Y Combinator, was promoted from director to president in 2018. Musk resigned from the board. board of directors and ceased its donations, having already contributed to the tune of 100 million dollars. OpenAI then took the turn of the so-called Transformer models in 2019 with the success that we know. Since the war has raged between Sam Altman and Elon Musk who have multiplied the spades on social networks.
It is in the light of this anecdote that we must look at OpenAI’s latest investment via its Startup Fund which aims to promote a new generation of artificial intelligence start-ups. The Norwegian robotics company 1X (ex-Halodi) announced a capital increase of 23.5 million dollars. 1X is making a wheeled humanoid robot called EVE used for guarding purposes and is set to unveil a bipedal android called NEO. US home security giant ADT has already signed a deal with 1X to conduct night patrols. The company is exploring applications in retail, logistics and healthcare. This foray into the field of robotics could bring OpenAI into indirect competition with Tesla, which has been promising since mid-2021 to launch a bipedal humanoid robot. Elon Musk’s robot is supposedly designed to perform repetitive manual tasks in factories and other workplaces.
The slow march of humanoid robots
OpenAI and Tesla aren’t the only ones taking a keen interest in this area. The Chinese Xiaomi is working on CyberOne, a robot able to perceive space in 3D but also to recognize individuals, their gestures, their expressions and their emotions. And Figure unveiled Figure 01 last month, an enticing humanoid robot project given credibility by the quality of the assembled team. The final robot would be fully electric, stand 1.6 meters tall, weigh 60 kilos with a 20-kilo payload and run for 5 hours on one charge. It would be bipedal, endowed with hands and thin enough to work in spaces designed for humans. The main use case targeted is that of logistics because it is an indoor environment, without customers, with already monitoring systems for autonomous mobile robots working around humans.
The ambition to create humanoid robots is not new and has already caused many disappointments. The pioneer Honda had stopped the development of its humanoid robot Asimo in 2018 after two decades of massive investment. Known for its famous dog robot Spot, Boston Dynamics is also developing Atlas, a humanoid model capable of handling heavy loads or performing a somersault, but until now it had not found any real commercial outlets. The resale in September to United Robotics Group of the French nugget Aldebaran by Softbank, its owner since 2015, also testified to the commercial failure of its Pepper robot.
In 2023, however, robotics start-ups are evolving in a more hospitable field. Many technological bricks (servomotors, materials, etc.) have already been developed. And the new models of artificial intelligence open up great prospects. After being trained from a wealth of data, extended language models can indeed mimic human responses to questions and hold conversations. They lack only a physical envelope.