Sanctuary AI collaborates with Microsoft to advance humanoid artificial intelligence research.

Sanctuary AI, a company focused on creating human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots, has announced a partnership with Microsoft to accelerate the development of humanoid robot AI models, including Sanctuary AI's Phoenix. This collaboration will leverage Microsoft Azure cloud resources to handle AI workloads, with the aim of evaluating the performance, efficiency, and planning capabilities of the models.

Building upon large-scale language models, Sanctuary AI is striving to achieve "large-scale behavior models" (LBM) that root AI in the physical world by enabling systems to learn from real-world experiences. These models will be integrated into Sanctuary AI's Phoenix robot's AI control system, Carbon, to achieve complex task execution.

Geordie Rose, CEO and co-founder of Sanctuary AI, emphasizes the importance of this collaboration, stating, "Creating systems that think and understand like humans is one of the greatest technological challenges and opportunities we will face as a civilization. Challenges like these require the collective efforts of the world's top talents."

Sanctuary AI brings extensive expertise to the partnership, with its leadership team including founders from D-Wave, Kindred AI, and Softbank Robotics. The company has demonstrated the capabilities of its robots through deployments in commercial environments and has tested 400 customer-defined tasks across various industries.

Ashley Llorens, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Microsoft Research, expresses enthusiasm for the collaboration, stating, "We are excited to partner with Sanctuary AI to accelerate AI model innovation and embodied AI research in areas such as reasoning, planning, and human-robot collaboration."

The collaboration between Sanctuary AI and Microsoft is not the tech giant's only bet in the field of humanoid robots. In February, Figure, OpenAI, and Microsoft announced a partnership to jointly develop AI models for next-generation humanoid robots. Similar to the collaboration with Sanctuary AI, Microsoft will provide Figure with access to its extensive AI infrastructure, training, and storage solutions through Azure.