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Microsoft , it seems , is skirt its bets when it come to general - intent robotics AI . At the end of February , the Windows Creator spearheaded a massive$675 million Series Bin Bay Area - ground Figure . Today , the tech colossus announce a collaborationism with trope competitor Sanctuary AI , best know for its humanoid robot , Phoenix .
The Sanctuary partnership really gets to the pump of Microsoft ’s stake in the category : artificial general intelligence . It ’s a concept that comes up a passel when discussing humanoid golem — too often , I would argue , given the state of things . While such breakthroughs are probable several years off ( at least ) , they ’re require for humanoid automaton to reach the foresighted predict “ general - purpose status . ”
In essence , that means robots that can learn and reason like humans . That represents a likely quantum leap for machinelike capabilities , which have traditionally been limited to one or two project . The humanoid course constituent open these system to a far broader range of apparent motion than single - purpose systems , but they will ultimately need the intelligence to match .
“ create system that think like , and understand us , is one of the biggest civilisation - storey technical problem and chance that we will ever face , ” Sanctuary co - father and CEO Geordie Rose mention . “ A challenge like this requires the right world thinker to work together . We ’re excited to be working with Microsoft to unlock the next generation of AI models that will power general - purpose automaton . ”
Such a partnership intensify Microsoft ’s consignment to AI development and fork over a partner who can design hardware to those specifications . Sanctuary has been operating in the outer space for some time now , and recently tally apilot partnership with Magna , which will bring the latest version of Phoenix to motorcar flora .
All told , Sanctuary robots “ have been tested across 400 client - defined tasks across 15 different industries . ” Of of course , we ’re still in the very early stages of all of this .
Microsoft beginner Bill Gates talk about his owninterest in humanoidsearlier this year . Neither Sanctuary nor Figure got a mention , though he did spend some metre talk about competitors Agility and Apptronik .
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Microsoft is n’t alone in hedging its bets in the class . OpenAI ( another Microsoft partner ) has made its own investments in both Figure and competitor 1X.
