Many of our first interactions with robots have watching a robot vacuum cleaner negotiate its way around our couch and make perilous journeys across our rugs. With recent advancements in AI, we may be getting closer to the moment that brings larger and more advanced humanoid robots into our homes at scale. Long popularized in decades of science fiction novels and movies, humanoid robots would be functional like robot vacuums but would be paired with advanced capabilities to interact with us and the rest of the world. Last week, University of Leicester AI and robotics lecturer Daniel Zhou Hao wrote that giving robots an AI upgrade would bring them closer to what he described as their “iPhone moment” as they break their way into the market. From a technological standpoint, we’re certainly getting there. Hao explained that large language models (LLMs) are great at processing and using large amounts of data and are key to embodied intelligence — allowing robots to use their limbs with autonomous purpose, just like we control our own bodies. For this to work, LLMs would need to be able to communicate with visual AI systems to help the robots make sense of what is in the space around them. Hao highlighted Google’s PaLM-E multimodal language model as an example of how such a system would work in practice. The lecturer predicted that this new range of robots could not only be used for space exploration and helping in factory assembly processes but they could also be used in our homes. Tasks the humanoid robots could perform include cleaning, cooking, and caring for the elderly. Companies like Google DeepMind, Tesla and Figure are already exploring ways to install language models as a way to help robots learn from the real world. Figure’s new 02 model includes OpenAI GPT-4o for real-time natural conversations.

Full story : Robots could end up being the next big thing in technology thanks to artificial generative intelligence.