Most attempts at building a humanoid robot, such as Tesla's Optimus, focus on assisting humans with physical, manual tasks. Figure is among the AI robotics startups that aren't satisfied with just movement. Figure is trying to take its humanoid robots to the next level by integrating language--and the results are quite impressive.

On Wednesday, Figure posted a two-minute video on X to demo what its humanoid robot Figure 1 can purportedly do thanks to a combination of the startup's neural networks and OpenAI's visual and language intelligence. Watch the video below. 

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The video opens with a person asking Figure 1 what the robot sees, to which Figure 1 conversationally explains exactly what is on the table in front of it, showcasing the robot's advanced natural language processing, language, and visual capabilities. 

Then, perhaps even more impressively, when the person asks Figure 1 for something to eat, the robot responds by choosing the apple amongst the items in front of it, highlighting the robot's ability to reason through a situation and deliver based on that processing.

When prompted, Figure 1 was even able to explain its choice, the video shows, while performing another task saying, "So I gave you the apple because it is the only edible item I could provide you with from the table."

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Figure announced its OpenAI partnership at the end of February with the hopes of leveraging OpenAI's research to enhance its humanoid robots' capabilities to process and reason from language. The robotics startup hopes the collaboration will accelerate how quickly its robots can come to market.

While it's easy to curate a demo like this to be as impressive as possible, not to mention edit any resulting footage, Figure appears to be making strides towards its goal. If this video is an accurate representation of what Figure 1 can do, Figure could be on the brink of a major breakthrough in the robotics space--a commercially available robot that can not only perform physical tasks, but also reason and speak, too.

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