“The video contains no teleoperation,” says Norwegian humanoid robot maker 1X. “No computer graphics, no cuts, no video speedups, no scripted trajectory playback. It’s all controlled via neural networks, all autonomous, all 1X speed.” This is the humanoid manufacturer that OpenAI put its chips behind last year, as part of a US$25-million Series A funding round. A subsequent $100-million Series B showed how much sway OpenAI’s attention is worth – as well as the overall excitement around general-purpose humanoid robot workers, a concept that’s always seemed far off in the future, but that’s gone absolutely thermonuclear in the last two years. 1X’s humanoids look oddly undergunned next to what, say, Tesla, Figure, Sanctuary or Agility are working on. The Eve humanoid doesn’t even have feet at this point, or dextrous humanoid hands. It rolls about on a pair of powered wheels, balancing on a third little castor wheel at the back, and its hands are rudimentary claws. It looks like it’s dressed for a spot of luge, and has a dinky, blinky LED smiley face that gives the impression it’s going to start asking for food and cuddles like a Tamagotchi. 1X does have a bipedal version called Neo in the works, which also has nicely articulated-looking hands – but perhaps these bits aren’t super important in these early frontier days of general-purpose robots. The vast majority of early use cases would appear to go like this: “pick that thing up, and put it over there” – you hardly need piano-capable fingers to do that. And the main place they’ll be deployed is in flat, concrete-floored warehouses and factories, where they probably won’t need to walk up stairs or step over anything.
Full story : OpenAI’s Eve humanoids make impressive progress in autonomous work.
