A World Built for Two: A Humanoid for Every Human 🌎

Author

Matthew J. Sánchez
March 06, 2023

First Monday of March! You all feeling good? It’s about to be spring which I find timely, considering everyone says we’re entering "AI Spring" 🌻

What do we have for you today?

 Robots and SaaS are today’s theme

🤖 How ChatGPT is helping robots (and vice versa)

🏠 Humanoids coming to a house, office, and facility near you soon

📈 Plus how AI can boost your company and why it’s worth investing into the tech now

Yin and Yang: robots helping ChatGPT, ChatGPT helping robots

The industry’s buzzing with excitement as Microsoft researchers experiment with ChatGPT to enable human-to-robot conversations. The researchers are testing whether users of ChatGPT can control robots without prior knowledge of programming languages or robotics. In other words, envisioning and breathing life into a future where people can comfortably and seamlessly command their home robot assistants and humanoids to complete tasks in the physical world.

ChatGPT can generate program code for robot activities using sensor data. Examples of ChatGPT’s capabilities range from zero-shot task planning (like controlling a drone) to perception-action loops (understanding the world around it before doing something).

This sub-sector is fun to see unravel. Take a look at ROSIE, where text-to-image generative models meet robotics (the team is augmenting real robotics data with semantically imagined scenarios for enhanced learning and easy manipulation). ChatGPT can accomplish a lot on its own but as you guessed it, the machine still requires human supervision for safety. Watch out haters, I’m warning you all now, I will be stunting with my own humanoid Rosie, feeling like I’m in the Jetsons 🤖

“One Humanoid for every human on the planet”

With its ambitious vision quoted above, the advanced AI robotics startup, Figure, emerged from stealth to build the future. Their problem statement is to address the projected decline in labor due to an aging population (about 85 million jobs to be vacant by 2030).

Founder & CEO Brett Adcock wants to change that. He sees a future where humans and humanoid robots work side-by-side. Figure’s business opportunities include: physical labor, consumer households, and even off-world. What does this have to do with generative AI? Like I touched on briefly above, researchers and companies (like Figure!) are already hard at work to make human-to-robot experience come within this decade. All only possible thanks for language models and computer vision.

Looks like humanoids might be the new cars soon? Will you get a Figure humanoid? A Tesla Optimus? Boston Dynamics Atlas? Xiaomi?

Adding AI to your bottom-line

The horizon is fresh with SaaS companies downsizing and injecting their businesses with AI to help with things like marketing, design, and code.

Our friends at SaaS Sunday shared 3 key ways AI can have SaaS companies working smarter, not harder.

  1. Leverage — automate everything and accomplish more with fewer resources. AI chatbots can handle basic customer service operations and tasks, freeing up humans to more knowledge work. Companies can also identify and prioritize high-value leads and at-risk accounts, tailoring outreach to increase customer engagement and retention. By automating communications and customer success, teams have more time to work on growth strategies and tasks that demand human empathy, judgement, and nuance.

  2. Profitability — reach and exceed your KPIs and overall performance. Yes, AI will require an upfront investment but the long-term benefits outweigh the initial hit to the pockets. With repeated actions, and learning customer data, AI can provide relevant upsells and tailored offerings that will boost satisfaction and loyalty; therefore, increasing revenue and lifetime value.

  3. Scalability — serve more customers and handle higher volumes. AI can be used to automate lead generation by reading data to identify potential customers and qualify which leads are most promising. AI can then study the behavior and preferences of qualified leads (forming a solid data flywheel) to determine the best ways to market to them, such as by providing targeted content and personalized recommendations.

For more thoughts and ideas, we suggest Can AI Really Help You Sell? shared by the Harvard Business Review.

Gen AI Deals that make your eyes (and mouth) water 💰

What caught our eye? 👀Based in London, the startup brings text-to-video to education. By turning text into dialogue for speaking avatars used in the Learning & Development (L&D) spaces, Colossyan is making it simpler for institutions to make videos for corporate communication, onboarding, sales enablement, and compliance.

New developments to spam your #random Slack channel 💬

Things to learn when you need a raise

Want access to the Generative AI investors database? Share and subscribe to AI In the Middle (below) to receive it! ⬇️

Before you go

What if tech execs were martial artists? 🥋

And scene. That’s all for Monday! Hope this kickstarts your week off right. We’ll see you Thursday. Thank you for always reading, sharing, and subscribing. Want to share something with us? Slide in our DMs, they’re open.

— Matthew J. Sánchez (@matthewjsanchez)