With the advent of the age of intelligent humanoid robots, experts promise a huge increase in productivity along with rising unemployment. The threat of remaining an undesirable expert loomed over the white-collar workers, the intellectual workers. However, the planned combination of robot technology with artificial intelligence may also affect factory workers.

OpenAI enters the realm of robotics

At first androids will not act like the smartest assistants without common sense, but they will learn very quickly, overcome limitations and start pushing people out of workshops. Perhaps this will be followed by a sharp decline in the wage level.

OpenAI, the developer of high-profile GPT language models, has also always been interested in robots. The ultimate goal is to create a universal artificial intelligence that can think no worse than a human. For many years the company had its own robotics department, in which it even made its own manipulator robot, which learned to assemble a Rubik’s cube with five fingers. But in 2021 the department was shut down and all efforts focused on productive AI. The main reason is the speed of getting results: there is much more text for educational language models than videos for educational robots.

new investments

Investment in Norwegian startup 1X, formerly known as Halodi Robotics, has signaled that OpenAI appears poised to make a comeback in the robotics space. There are still a few details. It is known that they announced the successful holding of another fundraising round that received $23.5M in just 1X, and the main investor is OpenAI through its Startup Fund program.

The startup made some headway with Eve, a wheeled android as Halodi, but now engineers want to get it back on its feet so it can do more human tasks. Now 1X is building a more humanoid robot, Neo, “to understand how artificial intelligence can form in an anthropomorphic body.” The results promise to show this summer.