Humanoid robots take over Las Vegas at CES, tech touts future of AI

The week that Sin City went sci-fi.

Humanoid robots shadowboxed, danced and pretended to run small shops. Singapore-based Sharpa has demonstrated a robotic hand that plays table tennis and deals with blackjack hands.

In Las Vegas, tech companies used the annual CES trade show to lay out their visions of the future and loudly declare that physical AI is poised for a breakout year.

“The humanoid industry builds on the work of AI factories that we build for other AI jobs.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company last year, announced the new version of its vision language models. It is called gr00t for humanoid robots that can convert sensor inputs into robot body control, as well as for a version of the Cosmos model for robot reasoning and planning.

Huang said he expects to see robots with some human-level abilities this year.

“I know how fast technology moves,” he said. His company highlighted its partnerships with companies such as Boston Dynamics. Caterpillar and LG.

Science fiction writers have been dreaming of this moment for decades. “The Jetsons” had Rosey the robot maid. In “Star Wars,” C-3PO helped Luke Skywalker save the galaxy. In real life, however, humanoids have so far failed to demonstrate the intelligence or flexibility that would make them truly useful; This is a problem that engineers have long overlooked.

Then came generative AI with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. The same deep learning technology that underpins ChatGPT can be used to teach robots to walk, use hands, or fold laundry. Many in the industry see self-driving cars as the first major commercial manifestation of physical AI.

Industry heavyweights are growing.

Other chip manufacturers besides Nvidia Advanced Micro Devices And Qualcomm He made striking announcements about robots at CES. On Monday, Google’s deepmind in question It will work with Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics, formerly a division of Google, to develop new artificial intelligence models for the Atlas robot.

McKinsey predictions The market for what it calls general-purpose robotics is projected to reach $370 billion by 2040, with major use cases such as “warehouse logistics, light manufacturing, retail operations, agriculture and healthcare.”

However, some analysts pointed out that it is a very long way from the show floor to the factory floor or home.

“Although humanoids are the thing that grabs everyone’s attention and are the best eye candy for show, we’re still a long, long way from commercial implementation of these,” Ben Wood, principal analyst at CCS Insight, said in an interview.

AMD CEO Lisa Su on Monday unveiled a new humanoid robot from the Italian company Generative Bionics, which she financially backs. Robot, Gen.01It is planned to be deployed in industrial environments such as shipyards later this year.

Generative Robotics uses AMD’s cloud-based graphics processing units to train and fine-tune its models.

“This allows us to customize the GPUs of next-generation models,” said Daniele Pucci, CEO of Generative Robotics. “This is the brain.”

Robot chip sales are a small portion of Nvidia’s business for now, and AMD reports them as “embedded” sales, a term used for industrial chips. Qualcomm’s “internet of things” revenue accounted for about 18% of the company’s sales in the last fiscal year.

But they see an opportunity to win business from a new group of robot makers by offering them not just chips but an entire software ecosystem that will make development easier.

“This is all about the big players establishing themselves as a one-stop shop for the robotics development community,” Wood said.

While the tech industry is fascinated by large language models in the generative AI boom, many robots are enabled by visual language models. They can pair sensor data from a robot with traditional AI models to enable reasoning or planning, such as a route through messy obstacles.

Alongside Nvidia’s VLM announcements at CES, Qualcomm also introduced a new line of robotic chips called Dragonwing that can use the company’s VLMs. Qualcomm uses tele-operations to teach VLM-specific skills, such as how to use actuators to grasp an object.

One area that Nvidia is particularly excited about is medicine.

company exhibited A robot from the company called LEM Surgical that uses the Thor chip. The robot was described as humanoid but had no legs. Instead, it had three arms, two for operating instruments and one for controlling the face-like camera and sensor module. Its sole function is to assist doctors in spine surgery.

Down in the exhibit hall, Nvidia displayed a Chinese humanoid robot called Agibot that used a large language model to chat with attendees despite having trouble standing on the conference center’s plush carpets.

Also at the show, Korea’s LG showcased its wheeled humanoid CLOiD robot for the first time.

In the show, CLOiD, designed for the home, promised to make breakfast and took a wet towel from the presenter and threw it into the washing machine.

But it was slow. It took CLOiD about 30 seconds to fold a rectangular towel laid out by the presenter.

Speed ​​isn’t the only problem. Experts are also concerned about security and the damage consumer robots could cause.

“The house is very unstructured,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Advanced Automation Association. “You can’t plan for a child to run into a robot or for the robot to run over a pet.”

Some of the first humanoid robots on the market may be more focused on fun and vanity than productivity. of china Unitree Robotics showcased its $70,000 G1 robot at CES. A large audience witnessed the boxing and dance show in the show area.