- Genesis AI robot hands handle border tasks
- They can make eggs and solve a Rubik’s Cube
- Training is done, in part, via low-cost wearable gloves
If there is a single barrier preventing humanoid robots from entering our homes and workplaces, it may be “border tasks.” These are complex, multi-step tasks like working as a lab assistant, solving a Rubik’s Cube, or making a delicious smoothie or omelet. These are the kinds of things most humans can do without thinking, but for robots and AI, it’s almost impossible to match your average lab technician or short-order cook at these skills.
Today, however, I saw a robot casually wiping some egg yolk off its fingers while it prepared lightly scrambled eggs. It was such a normal thing to do when successfully preparing a meal that, for a second, I forgot I was watching disembodied robot hands accomplish the task.
Those same very dexterous robot hands, all built and programmed by Genesis AI, also solved a Rubik’s Cube, did more than passable lab assistant work, and even made a delicious purple smoothie. The hands, part of a three-part system for developing, training and deploying AI, appear poised to change the way we think about robots in the home and workplace.
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“I don’t know, if you know,” Vivian Sun, Genesis AI’s vice president of business and strategy, told me, “80 percent of human work is done with their hands.” It turns out that this poses a huge problem for our long-awaited and fast-approaching robotic future. The type of work we do with our hands requires patience, skill, and dexterity on a human level (which is considerable).
Build and train a believable robot hand
Solving this problem and providing a solution to its Fortune 500 customers who have a multitude of use cases for these robots has become a priority for Genesis AI. The solution wasn’t just a robot or even an algorithm. This is an end-to-end solution that starts with data collection and a set of proprietary gloves.
Trainers wear thin, wireless gloves, covered in sensors and even including a camera, as they perform these frontier tasks, like making an egg, hundreds of times. “[It’s] the most natural way to interact with the physical world,” Sun explained.
These same trainers also wear a front camera to observe, for example, how a human breaks an egg.
This training data is then combined with “internet data” – thousands of online videos showing people cracking eggs and making scrambled eggs.
This is all valuable data fed into the new Gene Foundation Model of Genesis version 26.5, and which is then used to train and drive the hands of Genesis AI’s proprietary robot.
Look and work like the real thing
Genesis AI is unlikely to achieve the same kind of success if it put this complex data in a pair of claws.
“We have the most human-like robotic hand. These hands are owned by Genesis AI…[they] look exactly like a human hand in terms of functionality, in terms of proportions, in terms of size and shapes,” Sun said.
They fill a critical gap in the field by not only resembling human hands but, as I noticed in the videos, moving like them as well. In the egg video, underneath a pair of latex gloves, you might mistake them for human palms and 10 digits, except for the robot trunk they’re attached to.
The end-to-end process allows for a virtually direct transfer of human skills to the robot embodiment. This is, Geneis AI believes, a scalable solution. Sun told me that the training glove set is much more affordable and sensible than the current method of robotic training: teleoperation.
Teleoperation “is quite cumbersome. You have to organize the setup, hire people… and most of the time you can’t even recreate that scenario. For example, if you’re trying to learn how to repair a jet engine, how will you build a jet engine in your facility? It’s just impossible,” Sun said.
She couldn’t give a price for the gloves or the robot hands, but told me the gloves would be “50 times cheaper than the industry’s next products,” and added that they were 100 times cheaper than teleoperation.
What’s next
In the long term, Genesis AI plans to mass produce the glove and send it to businesses and homes, where wearers can help train Genesis AI robots.
Of course, it’s just a pair of highly articulated hands so far, but Sun told me they’re building a full robot.
Would they call it “Genesis Robot”? Sun didn’t want to say it, but laughed: “We have a name that we will tell you very soon. We have taken several workshops on the name. So yes, there is a name.”
For now, though, we have this small collection of frontier task videos that highlight what might be the pinnacle of robot dexterity. I asked Sun what she thought the first time she saw them.
“Personally, I was just stunned…seeing him actually, doing these types of long-term, very complicated tasks, it was almost like a reality check: This is the world we live in.”
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