You might want to take a seat before you read this, and ask ChatGPT to pass you a glass of water while you're at it

A relatively new AI startup has embedded OpenAI's artificial intelligence into the body of a robot

The new technology is being developed by Figure, a $26 billion AI robotics company affiliated with OpenAI Its latest innovation is Figure 01, a robot the company demonstrated in an impressive video

Judging by the acting ability alone, it's hard to tell who is the real person, but one would guess that Figure 01 is the shiny figure doing all the work

Figure01 is capable of real-time voice conversations, so text prompts are already becoming a thing of the past

Images are captured from an on-board camera to provide visual context to the robot, so when a human facing it says he or she is hungry, Figure 01 identifies and hands him or her an apple that is within reach We have successfully gone from "may I have something to eat" to an apple reaching the human's hand in approximately 10 seconds

Similar to the discussion with ChatGPT, Figure 01 can handle similarly complex conversations It can describe what it sees, plan future actions, reflect on memories, and verbally explain why

Behind the scenes, the robot's camera captures images, which are contextualized The microphone picks up audio, which is transcribed into text and fed into a large multimodal model trained by OpenAI that can understand both images and text

So when asked why Figure 01 gave him the apple, he immediately replied

Humans and apples have an interesting history The apple caused major problems in the Garden of Eden and later inspired Isaac Newton to develop his theory of gravity

Since Figure 01 can put things into context, perhaps we should ask Figure 01 what scenarios we should be prepared for Are we tapping into forbidden fruit or are we standing on the threshold of a new era of science and technology?