Sanctuary AI announces Microsoft collab.

VANCOUVER — Sanctuary AI announces that it is collaborating with Microsoft on the development of AI models for general purpose humanoid robots, including Sanctuary AI’s Phoenix™. Sanctuary AI and Microsoft will work together to bolster AI research and development and Sanctuary AI will leverage Microsoft’s Azure cloud resources for their AI workloads.

Building on the foundation of Large Language Models (LLMs), Sanctuary AI says they are making progress towards “Large Behavior Models” (LBMs) that ground AI in the physical world by enabling systems to understand and learn from real world experience. Sanctuary AI is taking advantage of these models for Carbon™, the AI control system for its Phoenix robots. Carbon is designed to enable the robot it controls to do complex tasks, due to its foundation of high quality behavioral data. Sanctuary AI will take advantage of Microsoft Azure infrastructure for training, inference, networking, and storage.

“Creating systems that think like, and understand us, is one of the biggest civilization-level technical problems and opportunities that we will ever face,” said Geordie Rose, CEO and Co-founder of Sanctuary AI. “A challenge like this requires the best global minds to work together. We’re excited to be working with Microsoft to unlock the next generation of AI models that will power-general purpose robots.”

The Sanctuary AI leadership team includes founders of D-Wave, the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, Kindred AI, the first company to use reinforcement learning in a production robot, and Softbank Robotics. Sanctuary AI was also the first company to deploy humanoid general-purpose robots in a commercial setting in early 2023. The robots were deployed in conjunction with one of the largest retailers in Canada, working both front-of-house and on logistics and warehouse-style tasks. The capabilities of Sanctuary AI’s robots have reportedly been tested across 400 customer-defined tasks across 15 different industries, with a focus on automotive, manufacturing, and logistics.

“We’re excited to be working with Sanctuary AI to accelerate AI model innovation and embodied AI research in areas like reasoning, planning, and human-agent collaboration,” says Ashley Llorens Corporate Vice President and Managing Director, Microsoft Research. “Through our collaboration, Sanctuary AI will have access to Microsoft Azure infrastructure and services as they explore the future of general-purpose robots that can assist across various use cases and industries.”