Figure AI's Helix robot learns from watching humans to grab, flip, and sort packages. It flattens labels, feels the difference between hard boxes and soft bags, and hands items to people on request. Wolfe sees it as the start of robots handling menial work so humans can do something better.
This company called Figure AI built a robot that can grab, flip, and sort packages. Now, that might not seem like the most futuristic use case, but the technology behind it is actually pretty wild. Helix uses AI that learns from watching humans. So the task here is to turn over all the packages so the label is facing down that thing it does when it pats the bag, so the label is flat. It learned that from watching us do it. It also apparently has a sense of touch, so it can tell the difference between hard boxes and soft bags and adjust its grip so it can grab without crushing anything. And after watching us more, it learned to do this. When it sees a human ask for something, it hands over the package. That's pretty interactive in terms of AI powered robots. Now, I know some people may be freaked out by this, but it's pretty cool to see robots gaining the ability to do most menial jobs so that hopefully humans can spend their time on more interesting and rewarding things.
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