There’s a lot of talk about how AI will overthrow humanity. Whether you believe in the doom and gloom of AI and robots or not, there’s been a lot of cool and a lot of terrifying developments in robotics and artificial intelligence in recent years. I’m not quite sure where this latest development falls, though, as it shows the first AI butlers cleaning up a home while working together. Is this the first step to the AI apocalypse? You be the judge.
The new robot butlers are part of 1X’s latest Eve lineup, and they’re a group of humanoid robots that can be controlled via voice. What’s most impressive about this demo is that the robots all seem to be working together—1X says up to 15 can work together at one time.
1X says the first AI butlers fun of a “voice-controlled natural language interface.” This essentially lets you chain commands together, creating a more useful approach for controlling the robots than just giving them one task at a time. This means that the Eve robots can understand complex goals with multiple steps—an impressive feat as many robots right now are tied to simple commands and goals.
All of the robots come in at six feet and two inches and can run for up to six hours. They can move at speeds up to nine miles per hour and can carry a maximum weight of 33 pounds. You can also control Eve remotely, thanks to a neural network system similar to what Tesla uses for its various electric vehicles. Of course, 1X isn’t stopping there.
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The company also has plans to improve its first AI butlers to include support for vision language models. This means providing more fluidity and autonomy to the robots. That’s where things might start to get scary for some folks, as autonomy means the robots will have some semblance of control over themselves.
1X is also working on another robot called Neo, which looks slightly more approachable than Eve. still, these humanoid robots are far from human-looking, despite the way their bodies are shaped. These designs are still a far-cry from those like China’s rifle-toting robot dog, though, so it will be interesting to see how they advance going forward.
