A Man Beat the Humanoid Robots at Sorting Packages. For Now…
Figure AI, a company that builds intelligent humanoid robots, switched on a livestream on May 13 and turned it off yesterday. 200 hours of work. They put three humanoids sorting packages on a belt, taking turns, no breaks, day and night. The stream ran until one of them broke. That was the goal, to see when they collapse.
In 10 days they sorted 200,000 packages. Three seconds a package, about the same as us. Nobody runs them from outside, they read the camera pixels and decide on their own.
At one point they put them up against a human. Ten hours, man against machine. The human won: 12,924 packages to 12,732. By a hair, but a guy on his own beat them. Except he came out with a forearm nearly broken and his hands covered in blisters. The robot didn’t, of course.
And meanwhile there’s another thing worth watching. The three robots are called Bob, Frank and Gary, well, it’s the viewers in the comments who gave them those names, names the company then printed on a tag. People got attached to one robot or another, ten million views, some watch the stream like a reality show. We humanize whatever resembles us, and soon we’ll grow fond of robots. Crazy? Think about the people who love their car and care for it like family, so imagine how this ends with humanoid robots.
And this stream isn’t just a toy. Behind it there’s Microsoft, Amazon and OpenAI, almost two billion raised, a valuation close to 40 billion. For now it’s more of a lab experiment than something ready for a real warehouse, they still mess up putting the packages down. But in 3 years things will look very different, a bit like when an IBM computer beat Kasparov at chess. Before then it seemed impossible it could happen, today we think it’s the least a computer can do.
What do you think?
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