Robotics firm Figure AI is getting a lot of attention for its humanoid robot, Figure 01, which the company unveiled along with news that it has raised $675 million, for a $2.6 billion valuation, from investors including OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Pronounced “Figure One,” the general purpose robot looks and moves like a human, and can perform mundane tasks like serving food as well as undesirable jobs like picking up trash. It “sees” using “onboard cameras that feed into a large vision-language model (VLM) trained by OpenAI,” according to Figure co-founder and CEO Brett Adcock.

“Despite reports of enterprises getting cold feet around embracing generative AI due to cost and accuracy issues, it’s clear that in the world of robotics, the AI age is just starting to take off,” writes VentureBeat, calling the result of Figure’s first collaboration with OpenAI “undeniably impressive.”

You can watch a video demonstration that VentureBeat describes as “straight out of a sci-fi film.”

TechRadar calls Figure 01 “stunning,” and says the new vision-language model (VLM) “has somehow transformed the bot from a rather uninteresting automaton into a full-fledged sci-fi bot that approaches C-3PO-level capabilities,” responding to questions in “a remarkably human-sounding voice.”

In the demo, when Adcock asks Figure 01 for a snack, it recognizes an apple as the only edible thing in a collection of items and dexterously picks it up and hands it over.

Adcock predicts Figure will revolutionize the global workforce, ameliorating what the company’s press release calls “unprecedented labor shortages with tens of millions of unsafe or undesirable jobs in the U.S. alone.”

Figure is able to perform various tasks in industries such as manufacturing, logistics, warehousing and retail. “Longer term, Figure’s humanoids will play an important role assisting in the home, caring for the elderly, and potentially even building new worlds on other planets,” the company says.

The Sunnyvale-based firm just emerged from stealth with a team of 40 experts from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), Google X, Cruise and Apple SPG, who have a combined 100 years of AI and humanoid experience.

CNBC says “Figure is part of a crowded field of companies vying to make humanoid robots a reality.” These include Amazon-backed Agility Robotics, which “plans to open a factory that can produce up to 10,000 of its bipedal Digit robots per year,” according to CNBC, which also mentions Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus Gen 2, and others.