The Toyota Research Institute has been doing some incredible work teaching robots to rapidly learn and perform tasks autonomously – now, it's bringing its Large Behavior Model tech to the extraordinary Atlas humanoid in partnership with Boston Dynamics. Humanoid robot hardware, believe it or not, is probably good enough already. More than a decade's worth of work at Boston Dynamics has resulted not only in an incredibly athletic and capable hydraulic Atlas robot, but a slew of emerging commercial competitors from , , , , and many others.
These remarkable robot bodies will continue to improve, but they're already good enough to perform all manner of useful work. The software is the problem. If you need a coding team to teach a robot a new behavior, it's scarcely better than today's conventional production robots.
But developing a general-purpose humanoid robot that understands the world and how to interact with it in flexible and adaptable ways is an enormous task. The answer is AI, of course, like the answer will soon be for everything – but AI needs to be trained on lots of data. ChatGPT, Grok, Llama and Claude all benefit from the insane quantity of (largely written) data humanity has accumulated over the centuries.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced so far so quickly, because language is a highly compressed representation of reality, crunched down to such small file sizes that vast amounts of it can be processed. There's much less data available to help robots .