Figure has demonstrated the first fruit of a collaboration between the company and OpenAI to enhance the capabilities of humanoid robots. In a video released today, the Figure 01 bot is seen conversing in real-time.
The development progress at Figure is nothing short of extraordinary. Entrepreneur Brett Adcock only emerged from stealth last year, after gathering together a bunch of key players from Boston Dynamics, Tesla Google DeepMind and Archer Aviation to "create the world's first commercially viable general purpose humanoid robot."
By October, the Figure 01 was already up on its feet and performing basic autonomous tasks. By the turn of the year, the robot had watch-and-learn capabilities, and was ready to enter the workforce at BMW by mid-January.
We got to see it on the warehouse floor last month, just before Figure announced a successful Series B funding round along with a collaboration agreement with OpenAI "to develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots." Now we get a taste for what that means.
Re: OpenAI News & Discussions
Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2024 3:39 pm
by weatheriscool
OpenAI's Sora Video Generator AI Will Be Available in a Matter of Months
OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati isn't offering a specific date but says you'll be able to try Sora later this year.
By Ryan Whitwam March 14, 2024 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/o ... -of-months
OpenAI's Sora video-generating bot made waves when it was announced in February, but only a few designers and filmmakers have been able to use it. OpenAI promised a full release in the future, and the wait might not be as long as we believed. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati says that Sora could be ready for the public in a matter of months.
The debut of Sora last month swept away the generative AI malaise we all felt from seeing a dozen almost identical chatbots hit the scene. Sora wasn't doing anything new—numerous text-to-video products are already available. However, Sora's videos look real. It can create photorealistic scenes or imitate styles like 3D animation and cartoons. The output is so impressive that the film industry is feeling the heat. Filmmaker Tyler Perry reportedly axed an $800 million expansion of his studio after seeing how far Sora had taken AI video.
By limiting access to trusted partners, OpenAI hopes it can ready Sora for a safe public release. Rooting for Sora to be released as soon as possible is probably a bad idea. It's possible to use text and image-based generative AI systems for malicious purposes. Still, a service that creates realistic videos from scratch could be abused with even graver consequences, particularly as the US careens toward what promises to be a tumultuous election season. Murati does note that the final version of Sora probably won't be able to recreate public figures.
It's no secret that Microsoft has been trying to get hundreds of millions of customers to try out its new AI-powered assistant, Copilot, for the past year. It's added it to its Bing search engine, Edge browser, and even Windows 11, and it's also free to use. The company also offers a "Pro" version for $20 a month that uses the latest "turbo" AI model from OpenAI, so it has access to more recent data and can handle larger text prompts. Now, Microsoft is letting people who use the free version of Copilot use the "turbo" model, a sweet freebie that will undoubtedly result in fewer people paying for the pro version.
Microsoft announced that it would add GPT -4 Turbo to the free version of Copilot on Twitter/X, causing people to ask, "What's the catch?" There doesn't seem to be one, though; it's just a free upgrade that could entice more people to give Copilot a spin. The company still offers the same GPT-4 Turbo model to its Pro customers, which is probably frustrating for this group since they're coughing up a chunk of dough each month for the privilege of using it. According to Cnet, GPT-4 Turbo has been trained using data up to April 2023, whereas GPT-4 ended its data collection in September 2021. This allows the newer model to provide more up-to-date results in queries.