There's a ton of these AI-powered humanoids under development at the moment, with all sorts of different hardware and learning approaches, but they're all focused on the same goal: taking over any physical task a human can do, and doing that job cheaper and more consistently.

The more they learn to do, the more robots these companies can sell, potentially decoupling economic growth from population figures and unlocking a source of labor that's limited only by resources. It sounds like a wild fever dream, but the hardware looks surprisingly capable, and while the AI models that train and control these robots are certainly still at a toddler stage of development, they definitely seem to be advancing at an impressive pace.

It really hits home just how different these machines will be from traditional industrial robots when they start talking back – in Figure's case, using a voice engine and language model from OpenAI: