AI humanoid learned how to make coffee just by watching humans do it

Baristas, look away now - because a humanoid robot has perfected the art of making coffee.

The robot took 10 hours of training and learning from humans before working out how to do it by itself.

The robot is Figure 01, and is what its parent company, Figure, is calling the 'world's first commercially-viable autonomous humanoid robot'.

The company says Figure 01 'brings together the dexterity of the human form and cutting edge AI to go beyond single-function robots and lend support across manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, and retail'.

And it might be coming for the hospitality industry, if this video is anything to go by.

The futuristic humanoid - which looks pretty much like any robot in a sci-fi movie - stands in front of a Keurig machine.

It then opens the top, picks up a pod and places it in, before closing the lid and pressing a button.

And voila - coffee starts coming out.

Sure, it's not exactly a French press and the robot doesn't look like it will be grinding its own beans any time soon, but it's still pretty impressive.

What's particularly interesting is the dexterity in the robot's fingers - it's able to delicately pick up the coffee pod and put it into the fairly precise slot.

Figure

But it seems like it took a fair bit of training to get there, with the video showing how Figure 01 learned to 'self-correct mistakes' - gathering data every time it tried to do the task, optimizing for the next time.

"Our AI learned this after watching humans make coffee. This is end-to-end AI: our neural networks are taking video in, trajectories out," wrote Figure founder Brett Adcock in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter).

He continued: "Why is this so important? The reason why this is so groundbreaking is if you can get human data for an application (making coffee, folding laundry, warehouse work, etc).

"You can then train an AI system end-to-end on Figure 01. There is a path to scale to every use case and when the fleet expands, further data is collected from the robot fleet, re-trained, and the robot achieves even better performance."

Adcock has proclaimed 2024 the "year of AI and Robotics" - and with recent leaps in tech including Tesla's new generation Optimus robot and the advent of restaurants run by robots and AI, we can't wait to see what the year holds.