😺 Bezos bets big on AI robots

PLUS: Rufus is finally here.

Welcome, humans.

Remember that Amazon shopping chatbot called Rufus we covered back in February? It’s finally here, and it can answer questions like “Is this coffee maker easy to clean and maintain?” based on product details, reviews, and Q&As.

Intriguing concept, tough to nail down. We’ll let the people decide if it’s useful. Here’s one question for Rufus: Why the heck did my single USB cable come in a box big enough for a mini TV?!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

AI-driven robots might just be having their ChatGPT moment. Might.
Meta will soon release Llama 3 450B, its ChatGPT-4 competitor.
OpenAI whistleblowers urged the SEC to probe OpenAI’s tight NDAs.
LivePortrait brings photos to life with eerily realistic facial animations.

Are robots about to have their ChatGPT-3 moment?

These days, it's not just AI startups raising obscene amounts (though $35.5B invested in the first half of 2024 isn’t minor). It's everything AI touches, including AI-powered robots.

Yes, literally AI inside of a robot.

We chatted about this in January, but it's worth repeating: when you put a literal brain in the form of AI behind a robot, it can do entirely new things. Take Figure AI, which raised $675M (!) in February.

Thanks to ChatGPT's vision capabilities, this robot can now hear, see, and autonomously (meaning without hardwired instructions) grab an apple on a table.

And yes, grabbing an apple might be trivial, but building cars? That’s no easy feat, and Figure’s humanoid robots are already helping build BMWs in Spartanburg (see here).

Then there's Skild AI, which is building a new foundational model (think AI brain) for generally intelligent robots, aka robots that can do anything we can, not just specialized tasks.

Their goal? Getting AI to do what humans usually do in the physical world—not art, but dishes and factory labor. They raised $300M from Jeff Bezos and others.

Skild AI

So ungodly amounts of money are being pumped into robotics startups, but will we actually see anything tangible beyond Roombas our cats love riding?

It might be a while before humanoid robots are in our homes doing dishes, let alone on construction sites.

Case in point: restaurant chains have been pumping hundreds of millions into food-making robots for years, swearing they definitely won't replace real human workers (yeah, right). In the short term, they might be right because the robots do kind of suck.

Remember Chipotle's "Chippy"? It got canned after it proved too expensive to make tortilla chips. Tortilla chips.

Automation of these jobs will no doubt come at some point in some form. But it might be the desk workers who see an AI in the office before table workers do.

Which of these AI robot scenarios do you think is most likely to happen first?

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Around the Horn.

Meta will release its best AI model yet on Tuesday, July 23, and it’ll be able to create images.
A new Senate bill, the COPIED Act, was introduced to protect creators' content and make it easier to identify AI-generated material.
OpenAI whistleblowers filed a complaint with the SEC, alleging the company used overly restrictive employee agreements to prevent staff from reporting potential AI risks.
OpenAI is creating a new way to power its AI models, dubbed “Strawberry,” which can hop around the internet to answer complicated questions.

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