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TikTok parent company ByteDance has built a robotic system that allows bots to perform household tasks such as folding laundry and cleaning tables.
The system uses artificial intelligence (AI) that allows robots to follow language commands and carry out tasks.
China, where ByteDance is based, has been developing the technology at lightning speed with the development of its DeepSeek and Manus.
According to chip designer Nvidia, robotics is the next phase of AI.
That’s because while tech companies have been trying to build a general-purpose robot for years, programming robots is difficult. However, with AI, it becomes much easier.
What did ByteDance do?
ByteDance built a large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) model called GR-3, which allows robots to follow natural language commands and do general tasks.
GR-3 can be thought of as the brain of the robot.
ByteDance used a robot called ByteMini for the experiment. After GR-3 was inserted into it, the robot could put a shirt on a hanger and place it on a clothing rack.
Video by the company also shows the robot picking up household items and placing them in a designated spot. It could differentiate between sizes, successfully following commands to pick up the “larger plate”.
It also completed tasks such as cleaning up the dining table.
ByteDance’s Seed department, which heads the company’s AI research and large language model (LLM) development, said it trained the model with image and text data and then fine-tuned it with data from humans interacting in virtual reality. It was also taught to copy the movements of real robots.
ByteDance appears to be increasingly focusing on AI, launching the Seed department in 2023.
The new development comes as TikTok is facing another threat of being banned in the US unless the company sells its American assets.
US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick reiterated this on Thursday, saying, “China can have a little piece or ByteDance, the current owner, can keep a little piece”.
“But basically, Americans will have control. Americans will own the technology, and Americans will control the algorithm,” Lutnick told CNBC, adding that if this doesn’t happen, “TikTok is going to go dark, and those decisions are coming very soon”.