Microsoft to Power General Purpose Humanoid Robots with Sanctuary AI

Vancouver-based AI and robotics company Sanctuary AI, which is on a mission to create world's first human-like intelligence in general purpose robots, announced its collaboration with Microsoft to develop the AI models for the robots. 

Sanctuary AI will use Microsoft Azure’s cloud resources for the AI workload, and will collaborate to boost AI research and development. Further, Azure infrastructure will be used for training, inference, networking and storage. 

The robotics company is working on Large Behaviour Models (LBMs) that connect AI to the physical world by allowing systems to understand and learn from real world experience. These models will be used for Carbon, the AI control system that powers its Phoenix robots. 

“A challenge like this requires the best global minds to work together. We’re excited to be working with Microsoft to unlock the next generation of AI models that will power-general purpose robots,” said Geordie Rose, CEO and co-founder of Sanctuary AI. 

“We're excited to be working with Sanctuary AI to accelerate AI model innovation and embodied AI research in areas like reasoning, planning, and human-agent collaboration," said Ashley Llorens, corporate vice president and managing director, Microsoft Research.

Race Towards Humanoid Robots

The race towards creating humanoid robots is spearheading with big tech companies collaborating and investing in emerging robotics startups. 

Figure Robotics, which created Figure 01 humanoids, has OpenAI’s ChatGPT integrated as its voice modality. The company is backed by top investors including OpenAI, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos and others. 

Boston Dynamics, the pioneers in robotics, also recently unveiled its new electric model of humanoids. 

Source: X