Sanctuary AI and Microsoft to work on the development of AI models for general purpose robots

Sanctuary AI, a startup which is trying to create the world’s first human-like intelligence in general purpose robots, today announced its partnership with Microsoft. Both the companies will be working on the development of AI models for general purpose humanoid robots. Also, they will work to improve AI research and development and Sanctuary AI will be using Azure for their AI workloads involving training, inference, networking, and storage.

Key takeaway:

Microsoft will offer its Azure cloud resources for this endeavor. Sanctuary AI brings extensive experience in robotics and AI, having made significant industry breakthroughs.

What Sanctuary AI does:

Think of Large Language Models (LLMs) as the way super-smart chatbots understand text. Sanctuary AI is building something similar but for robots, called Large Behavior Models (LBMs). LBMs help robots learn from the actual world, not just computer simulations. Sanctuary AI built a robot “brain” called Carbon that uses LBMs. Because Carbon learns from real-life experiences, the robot it controls can do more complicated things.

Quotes:

“Creating systems that think like, and understand us, is one of the biggest civilization-level technical problems and opportunities that we will ever face,” said Geordie Rose, CEO and Co-founder of Sanctuary AI. “A challenge like this requires the best global minds to work together. We’re excited to be working with Microsoft to unlock the next generation of AI models that will power-general purpose robots.” 

“We’re excited to be working with Sanctuary AI to accelerate AI model innovation and embodied AI research in areas like reasoning, planning, and human-agent collaboration,” says Ashley Llorens Corporate Vice President and Managing Director, Microsoft Research. “Through our collaboration, Sanctuary AI will have access to Microsoft Azure infrastructure and services as they explore the future of general-purpose robots that can assist across various use cases and industries.”