The dream of having robots do household chores inched a little closer to reality last week. Figure, an OpenAI-backed robotics artificial intelligence (AI) startup, showed off humanoid robots that can understand voice commands and can grab objects they had never seen before. In a Figure video, a guy holding a bag of groceries starts unloading eggs, apple, ketchup, cheese, cookies and other items on a counter. “Hey Figures, can you come here?” the person said to the robots. “Even though this is the very first time that you’ve ever seen these items, I’d like you to use your new Helix AI and try to reason through where you think they belong … and work together to put them away. Does that sound good?” The robots started putting the fresh items — eggs, ketchup and cheese — in the fridge. Cookies in a drawer and the apple in a container on the counter. They worked together, even handing some items to each other. Figure claims it is the first to enable two robots to collaborate on a task and that the bots can pick up “virtually any small household object” even if they’ve never seen it before. The robots are powered by Helix, a generalist AI model that combines vision, language understanding, and movement control to make robots smarter and more adaptable.

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