ByteDance bites into robotics with AI helper that cleans kitchens, folds laundry

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has developed an advanced robotic system designed to assist with household chores such as cleaning tables and hanging laundry. This system integrates the GR-3 model, a large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) AI that enables robots to understand natural language commands and perform dexterous tasks. Using a bimanual mobile robot called ByteMini, ByteDance demonstrated capabilities like hanging shirts on hangers, recognizing objects by size and spatial location, and completing complex tasks such as cleaning a dining table with a single prompt. Notably, the robot could handle items it was not explicitly trained on, showcasing adaptability beyond its training data. The GR-3 model was trained through a combination of large-scale image and text datasets, virtual reality human interactions, and imitation of real robot movements. ByteDance’s Seed department, established in 2023 to focus on AI and large language models, leads this robotics research. Despite ongoing geopolitical challenges—such as U.S. pressures on Byte