Scout AI is using technology borrowed from the AI industry to power lethal weapons--and recently demonstrated its explosive potential. Like many Silicon Valley companies today, Scout AI is training large AI models and agents to automate chores. The big difference is that instead of writing code, answering emails, or buying stuff online, Scout AI's agents are designed to seek and destroy things in the physical world with exploding drones. In a recent demonstration, held at an undisclosed military base in central California, Scout AI's technology was put in charge of a self-driving off-road vehicle and a pair of lethal drones. The agents used these systems to find a truck hiding in the area, and then blew it to bits using an explosive charge.

A dozen or so young men and women, eyes obscured by VR headsets, shuffle around a faux kitchen inside a tech company's Silicon Valley headquarters. Their arms are bent at the elbows, palms facing down. One pilot stops to pick up a bottle of hot sauce from a counter, hinging at the waist, making sure to keep her hands in view of the camera on her headset at all times. Meters away, two humanoid robots, with bulbous joints and expressionless plastic domes for faces, stand at a desk. In front of each is a crumpled towel; to its right, a basket. More often than not, the towel catches on the edge of the basket and the robot freezes. Then an engineer steps in and returns the towel to a crumpled heap, and the sequence begins again. This was the scene inside the Silicon Valley headquarters of Figure AI on an August morning this year. The three-year-old startup was in a sprint ahead of the October announcement of its next robot, the Figure 03, which was undergoing top-secret training when TIME visited.

But Rus and many others I spoke with at the expo suggest that this hype just doesn't add up. Humanoids "are mostly not intelligent," she said. Rus showed a video of herself speaking to an advanced humanoid that smoothly followed her instruction to pick up a watering can and water a nearby plant. But when she asked it to "water" her friend, the robot did not consider that humans don't need watering like plants and moved to douse the person. "These robots lack common sense," she said.

A new automated humanoid robot powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT resembles something akin to the AI Skynet from the sci-fi film Terminator While the new robot is not a killing machine, Figure 01 can perform basic autonomous tasks and carry out real-time conversations with humans - with the help of ChatGPT. The company, Figure AI, shared a demonstration video, showing how ChatGPT helps the two-legged machine visual objects, plan future actions and even reflect on its memory. Figure's cameras snap its surrounding and send them to a a large vision-language model trained by OpenAI, which than translates the images back to the robot. The clip showed a man asking the humanoid to put away dirty laundry, wash dishes and hand him something to eat - and the robot performed the tasks - but unlike ChatGPT, Figure is more hesitant when it comes to answering questions. Figure AI hopes that its first AI humanoid robot will prove capable at jobs too dangerous for human laborers and might alleviate worker shortages. 'Two weeks ago, we announced Figure OpenAI are joining forces to push the boundaries of robot learning,' Figure founder Brett Adcock wrote on X. 'Together we are developing next-generation AI models for our humanoid robots,' he added.

The funding round is nearly ten times as much as the 70 million that this new robotics firm, Figure AI, managed to raise last May. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, through his venture firm Explore Investments LLC, pledged an optimistic 100 million to the company, with Microsoft investing nearly as much, 95 million. Figure AI hopes that its first AI humanoid robot, Figure 01, will prove capable at jobs too dangerous for human laborers and might alleviate worker shortages. For now, the humanoid machine has proven itself adept at making a cup of coffee. Figure AI hopes that its first AI humanoid robot, Figure 01, will prove capable at jobs too dangerous for human laborers and might alleviate worker shortages.

Eight years ago, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency organized a painful-to-watch contest that involved robots slowly struggling (and often failing) to perform a series of human tasks, including opening doors, operating power tools, and driving golf carts. Clips of them fumbling and stumbling through the Darpa Robotics Challenge soon went viral. Today the descendants of those hapless robots are a lot more capable and graceful. Several startups are developing humanoids that they claim could, in just a few years, find employment in warehouses and factories. Jerry Pratt, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a nonprofit research institute in Florida, led a team that came second in the Darpa challenge back in 2015.