Apparently, Microsoft has a hedge on general-purpose robotics AI. On the last day of February, the windows maker led an enormous $675 million Series B in Bay Area-based Figure. Now, the technology giant announced a collaboration with Figure competitor Sanctuary AI, known for its humanoid robot, Phoenix.

The Sanctuary partnership really gets at the heart of what Microsoft is interested in within the category: artificial general intelligence. It's a concept that comes up often when discussing humanoid robots — too often, if you ask me, given the state of things. While such breakthroughs are doubtless several years off, at the very least, they are required for humanoid robots to achieve the long promised "general-purpose status.

Essentially, that means robots that think and reason as humans do. That is the potential quantum leap in robotic capability, which has historically been restricted to one or two tasks. The humanoid form factor opens these systems to much greater ranges of motion than single-purpose systems, but they will ultimately need the intelligence to match.

Creating systems that think like, and understand us, is one of the biggest civilization-level technical problems and opportunities that we will ever face," Sanctuary co-founder and CEO Geordie Rose notes. "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.

Such a partnership deepens Microsoft's commitment to AI development and delivers a partner who can design hardware to those specifications. Sanctuary has been operating in the space for some time now, and recently scored a pilot partnership with Magna, which will bring the latest version of Phoenix to car plants.

All told, Sanctuary robots “have been tested across 400 customer-defined tasks across 15 different industries.” Of course, we’re still in the very early stages of all of this.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke about his own interest in humanoids earlier this year. Neither Sanctuary nor Figure got a mention, though he did spend some time discussing competitors Agility and Apptronik.

Microsoft isn't alone in hedging its bets in the category. OpenAI - another Microsoft partner - has also made investments in both Figure and competitor 1X.