Microsoft, it seems, is hedging its bets when it comes to general-purpose robotic ai. In late February, the Windows maker led a massive $675 million Series B in the Bay Area. Today, the tech giant announced a collaboration with figure competitor Sanctuary ai, best known for its humanoid robot, Phoenix.
The partnership with Sanctuary really gets to the heart of Microsoft's interest in the category: artificial general intelligence. It's a concept that comes up a lot when talking about humanoid robots; I would say too often, given the state of things. While such advances are likely several years away (at least), they are necessary for humanoid robots to reach the long-promised “general-purpose status.”
In essence, that means robots that can learn and reason like humans. This represents a potential quantum leap for robotic capabilities, which have traditionally been limited to one or two tasks. The humanoid form factor opens these systems to a much wider range of motion than single-purpose systems, but they will ultimately need the necessary intelligence.
“Creating systems that think like us and understand us is one of the biggest civilizational technical problems and opportunities we will ever face,” says Sanctuary co-founder and CEO Geordie Rose. “A challenge like this requires the best global minds to work together. “We are excited to work with Microsoft to unlock the next generation of ai models that will power general-purpose robots.”
This partnership deepens Microsoft's commitment to ai development and provides a partner who can design hardware to those specifications. Sanctuary has been operating in the space for some time and recently signed a pilot partnership with Magna, which will bring the latest version of the Phoenix to auto plants.
In total, Sanctuary robots “have been tested on 400 customer-defined tasks across 15 different industries.” Of course, we're still in the early stages of all of this.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke about his own interest in humanoids earlier this year. Neither Sanctuary nor Figure received any mention, although he did spend some time talking about their competitors Agility and Apptronik.
Microsoft isn't alone in hedging its bets in the category. OpenAI (another Microsoft partner) has made its own investments in both Figure and its competitor 1X.
