The Year of the Robot
As robotic capabilities have progressed from toys and vacuum cleaners to highly advanced robotic humanoids, so too have the associated challenges and legal implications. This week on “Waking Up With AI,” Katherine Forrest explores these developments, as well as her personal experiences with Tesla’s Optimus Pro robot.
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Katherine Forrest: Hey, folks. Welcome to today's episode of “Waking Up With AI,” a Paul, Weiss podcast. I'm Katherine Forrest, and yes, it is true. We have another solo episode today. Anna and I are exchanging these solo episodes, as we are in different time zones and have not yet been able to get synced up. We were just laughing about it this morning because her time zone is such that only at the very early morning hours is it reasonable to ask her to join me in doing something. So I'm going to do it alone here. And so I thought as a result of that, that I would take the opportunity to talk about something that's an experience that I had personally and to tell you all about it, because it is relevant to both the AI conversations that we've all been having in these episodes over the, now, year almost. And also, about some of the legal issues that could come up with some of these things.
So I ordered a robot, and that's what we're going to be talking about today. Now, we all know that toys in the form of various kinds of robots have been around for a while, and most of those toys were not in fact robots. They looked like robots, but they were just battery-powered things that sort of walked across a floor. Then in the recent years, there have been increasing amounts of sophisticated kit robots that have come out, but robotics in a basic sense, not in sort of a cognitive AI sense necessarily. But we're moving away from that. There's actually today — this is not by the way the robot that I ordered — but we're moving away from even toys that are simply just mechanical-looking robots to things that are more aligned with different kinds of cognitive capabilities.
So there's this robot puppy called Loona, L-O-O-N-A, that is available online, and it's based actually on ChatGPT-4o. It's enabled by that. It's not made by the company, but it's enabled by ChatGPT-4o, and it responds to voice commands and recognizes commands in multiple languages. And it can also chase laser pens, and it can fetch special balls that are sort of shaped in a geometric, geodesic kind of shape that you can see on, for instance, Amazon. And it also, interestingly, has a home monitor. So let's just hope that if anybody gives Loona the puppy to anybody else that they tell them that there's a home monitor camera inside of Loona who can double as a monitoring device. But anyway, these are all toys of one sort or another. And I have actually ordered a number of these kind of robotic toys, and the increasingly more sophisticated ones, over the last couple of years for various kinds of children and nieces and nephews and this and that. And so I have been watching this area quite a lot.
But I also had ordered one of those Roombas, the grown-up world of robots, the devices that have some kind of robotic capability in them. But that's also not the basis of my story today. But let's talk a little bit about the Roomba because it sort of is leading us from toys to adult robotic uses. And the Roomba started off as a vacuum cleaner that, when it would run into things, it sometimes could get around them and sometimes could map rooms, but sometimes would actually have a hard time. It could get stuck on long kinds of carpet. A lot of that's really interestingly been solved. And now you can actually get a Roomba that will, and by the way, Roomba is one type of this kind of robotic home vacuum cleaner. There are actually about 12 or even more companies that make these. And so that's just the name that I happen to use because I happen to have one of these. But now you can get these vacuum cleaners that can climb stairs, they can pick up socks, they can avoid obstacles, they can get over things, they can avoid your pets, they don't sort of eat your cat anymore. I don't think they ever really ate your cat, but in any event, you get the idea. And of course, these Roomba vacuum cleaners are only a small step from what also exists in the form of robotic lawn mowers, which you can get and they can map the perimeter of your home. A lot of it's based on LiDAR technology. They can avoid obstacles, go up hills, go over rocks, things like that. And now there are actually these kinds of robotics that are in all kinds of forms for human arms and legs that go over a robotic exoskeleton, if you will, or ectoskeleton that will go over your arm or leg and help individuals who are having issues with flexing or the electrical connections actually be able to do that. And of course, many of you who may have been to some airport lounges recently will have seen some of the robotic bussing capabilities that are now in airport lounges. But in South Korea, where I was about almost a year ago, in South Korea they had robotic bussers, as well as you could order your food from robotic waitstaff.
So now let's get to the robot that I actually pre-ordered. Somebody sent me a contract because I had pre-ordered it to the point where I had sort of bought it, but I’ll give you the punchline which is I've managed now to cancel the order for the reasons that I'll go into. So I saw advertisements for this thing called the Tesla robot called Optimus, and there's actually a family of robots. There's three Optimus robots and it's a general purpose robot and the company calls it a robotic humanoid. And so because Optimus sort of sounds like a male name, I'll just call it a “he” for the moment, but just know that it could be a he, she, it, they, doesn't really matter. But you can go to the Tesla website today, right now, and you can place an order for an Optimus. Now, there are a couple of important characteristics about this Optimus humanoid robot that are interesting, but not surprising, which is that stands about 5 feet 8 inches tall and it weighs about 125 pounds. Now there's also another company that is called Figure, which makes its own set of humanoid robots, and its robot is 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs about 155 pounds. But let's talk about Optimus for a second. We'll get to Figure in another moment. Optimus is designed to do a whole bunch of different things. And it's got a kind of physicality that allows it to manipulate objects, walk up and down hills and rocky terrain. That was one of the big new physicality capabilities that Tesla had announced at the end of last year. But what's really interesting is its brain. So Optimus is designed around a neural network, and it has a series of about 30 cameras on different parts of this humanoid robot, which means it's — by the way, when I call it humanoid, I mean it's got sort of a torso with arms and legs and feet and hands and something that looks a little bit in the shape of, if you will, of a human-ish head but it doesn't have, it's metallic and plastic and so it doesn't have any kind of human covering or skin or clothing or anything like that. But Optimus, with this neural network, is in effect like a multimodal large language model. And I'm going to say in effect because it's actually a lot more complicated than that.
So let me then, we'll just keep that as a placeholder for Optimus for a moment and just also talk about the fact that Meta just announced in the last couple of days that it's making a very big commitment into humanoid robots. And also there's this company that I mentioned a few minutes ago called Figure. And Figure has now advanced its humanoid robots to a deployed robot called Figure 02 that actually has incredibly impressive movement and speech capabilities. So impressive, if you look it up on YouTube, you will see that it looks as the 02 looks as if it's a human, like a Halloween costume made to look like a robot. And in fact, Figure 02 is robotic. It just happens to have very, very smooth movement. Now, Figure is not available, as far as I'm aware, for personal purchase. But it is actually available through arrangements that I'm not, you know, I don't know how the arrangements are made, but I do know that at least one large automobile manufacturer has ordered a number of Figure 02s who have been deployed now into a factory setting and are doing factory work. And so, both Figure 02 and the Optimus, and by the way, Optimus comes in three different levels. There's sort of the Optimus Gen 1, there's an Optimus Gen 2 and then there's an Optimus Pro. But the Optimus 2 and Pro, along with the Figure 02, are all being built to reason, companies say, and learn like humans and to learn iteratively so that the neural network, by having the humanoid robot actually interact with the environment around the robot through seeing and hearing and interacting physically in certain environments, the robot will take that information, feed it into the neural network and then learn from it. So both of these types of robots, the Optimus and the Figure 02, are trained on vast amounts of training data. And the Figure 02 has partnerships with OpenAI, Microsoft and Nvidia. If you go to the Figure website for the company that actually makes Figure 02, they say, “We believe humanoids,” and that's referring to the humanoid robots, “will revolutionize a variety of industries from corporate labor roles, to assisting humans in the home, to caring for the elderly, to building new worlds on other planets.”
Okay, so let's now talk about what I did and how it sort of got me into thinking about this whole thing. So I did this little pre-order of an Optimus. And I went onto the website and I thought, oh my goodness, I can order a robot and it will be delivered to my home. Although TBD when it was actually going to be delivered because they're apparently made-to-order and the website was not clear exactly what my delivery date would be. But I thought, wow, this is really nifty. And so I compared between my various Optimus options, and I realized that the Optimus Pro can go up to 24 hours of what they call autonomy time, which is really I think of as colloquially battery life. And it can actually achieve a speed of up to 12 kilometers per hour, and it actually it's referred to as really having adaptive learning capabilities. So it's a little pricey. It's $63,000, but you only have to put $250 down. And one hopes that the price will come down. And so what I did on this day that I decided to — for reasons that are known to no one, including myself — order this robot, was I put the $250 down for Optimus Pro. So that was all good because I had this visualization that I was ordering this humanoid robot. It was going to be really interesting to watch this robot interact with the world. I envisioned him being delivered. He was going to make me coffee, I thought, maybe do my laundry. I figured it would just do tasks around the house, right? But then I sort of had to stop and think and I thought, well, now okay, how does one break it to one's spouse and family that you're bringing in a 5 feet 8 inch being or thing or something into the house. I thought, well, what do I do with this? Because now I'm going to have to, you know, this Optimus is going to be around all the time. Can you send Optimus to a corner? Does Optimus sit at the dinner table? Does Optimus come to breakfast? Is Optimus there when you're drinking your coffee? And I suddenly thought, this is actually a much more complicated situation I've got on my hands. If I go away for a weekend, does Optimus jump in the back seat? You know, is Optimus going to get along with the dog? And is Optimus going to sort of run over the neighbor's cat? And so I really had not thought of any of these things.
So even with all of my AI background, I'd just gotten so excited about the ability to order this Optimus that I hadn't thought through what it would mean to bring in a 5 feet 8 inch, 125 pound thing that, by the way, does talk, but has 30 cameras. I then, being the lawyer that I am, went on to the website, found the contract. Well actually, they had sent it to me by email by this point, which is like three minutes later. And I figured out how to cancel the order, which was very easy, but they wanted me to tell them why. And so I said, I think that it's a family conversation that I need to have before I bring this 5 feet 8 inch — I don't know if I can call it a being or a thing, an entity, whatever you're going to call it — into the house that's going to be listening and learning from all of us.
So, you know, of course there are legal questions that came up in my mind. Like if Optimus breaks something, was it going to be covered by my homeowner’s insurance? And, or does he come with like a no breakage warranty that I get to rely on? Like he won't break anything. But what if he squishes my neighbor's pet by mistake? Does my excess liability insurance actually cover that? So, anyway, I filled out the rescission paperwork or the cancellation paperwork, I should say. And then I thought, I'm going to put off my purchase of Optimus until I have this family conversation that I need to have about this 5 feet 8 inch being entering our world. But what I want to say, and here's really the moral to the story. And Anna, I bet you really wish you were here for today's episode, so you could have cut me off. But what I really want to say is these robots are here now. And when you can actually go and order one, even if it's going to be delivered in, I don't know, eight months, a year, six months, I have no idea, eight weeks, whatever it's going to be, if you can order one and you've got a neural network wandering around your house and it's got 30 cameras on it and it's doing adaptive learning. And then you've got Figure 02 that's actually deployed now by a large manufacturing company in the factory that has got neural network as its primary cognitive architecture. We are in a different place. We are not in the world of Roombas. We're not in the world of robots and little Loona puppies, although Loona seems to be actually a very sophisticated puppy. But let's put that aside. So we're entering a whole world of robots.
And so 2025 is going to be, as we said I think at the beginning of the year, this year is going to be the year of the robot. So go on to the website, look at Optimus, explore it, go to YouTube, look at what Figure 02 can do. And let's all think about that and the growing capabilities of these robots as the year goes on. Okay, that's all we've got time for today. I'm Katherine Forrest. Thanks for tuning in and we hope to have Anna back with us next week. If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Thanks.
