Opinion
Adcock claims Figure's internal AI team was running circles around OpenAI
“It got to a point where we were just like, our team internally that was designing these models were running circles around OpenAI. We were just way better at this. And we were better about testing on the robots, training the models, like all, all of it.”
Disclosure
Brett Adcock says he terminated Figure's AI collaboration agreement with OpenAI
“And so I fired him.”
Opinion
Adcock: Trying to code humanoid robot behaviors is a complete dead end
“You basically can code your way out of this, and I think that's a full dead end, or you can run an AI-first strategy in the market, and that's what we do here at Figure.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adcock: Figure demonstration robots run purely autonomously with onboard Helix AI
“This is not tele-operated.
For sure not tele-operated.
No secret room.
these robots are running purely autonomously from an onboard AI policy called Helix running onboard the robot in the torso.”
Disclosure
Adcock: Figure plans to lease home humanoids for $400-$600 monthly
“The in-home, like, we have, we're not selling right now to the home. We want to sell here like, in the near term, and we want to sell the robot, like, for, like, hundreds of dollars a month, and as, like, somewhere like a car lease maybe, like, four or five, 6…”
Opinion
Adcock: Figure is probably a few years ahead of all global competitors
“We think we're probably at this point a few years ahead of every big, everybody globally doing this.”
Opinion
Boston Dynamics' Atlas was an unsafe, uncommercial research project, says Adcock
“And I think for humanoids, like, you know, the best we had four years ago was like a, you know, Boston Dynamics had a hydraulic humanoid called Atlas. It like dripped oils everywhere. It lasted like 20 minutes. It was like very big, very unsafe. You could neve…”
Assertion Supported
Adcock: Figure robots run entirely on Helix vision-language-action model
“You can't write code to make this work. So all of our robots here run on a neural network we call Helix. It's a vision language action model we designed here internally to tell the robot what to go do, to stay balanced, like how to move its joints basically fr…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adcock: Figure's data collection will generalize across global environments
“Our hypothesis now is that we will see enormous amount of positive transfer from the data collection efforts we're doing now into pre-training across, like, basically any environment in the world.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adcock: AGI might be achieved first in humanoid robotic embodiments
“So in some way I think we'll get to at or even beyond human level intelligence in these systems. It actually might be the case that we get to artificial general intelligence first in these embodiments.”
Insight
Adcock: Real-world interaction data is the missing piece to true AGI
“Because we're able to, like, this interaction data of, like, touching the world and seeing what happens through trial and error is, like it basically most of human intelligence is built this way, and I think this is, like, the last missing piece to get the tru…”
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2031
Adcock: Figure will reach full lights-out manufacturing where robots build robots
“At some point here, it'll just be like it'll just be full lights out manufacturing. We'll have like robots only building robots and sending out to the world. Robots will be getting into boxes themselves. Other robots will be boxing them up and we'll be shippin…”
Insight
Adcock: Physical AGI starts with solving robotic hands
“I think this is extremely important to get, if we want to solve, like AGI and get to, like, human intelligence in the physical world, like, it's all going to start here with the hands for us.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Figure is not teleoperating its humanoid robots, says founder Brett Adcock
“We're not teleoperating this stuff.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adcock: Humanoid robots are working now in living rooms and commercial settings
“We just want humanoid robots to work, and like, they're working now. It's pretty simple. Like, we're seeing robots to do everyday things. Like, we saw it clean up a living room, do commercial work.”
Insight
Adcock: Humanoid Robotics Is an Intelligence Problem, Not Manufacturing
“In my mind, this is not a manufacturing problem. This is an intelligence problem.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adcock: Solving humanoid robotics will create the world's largest business
“It's if you can solve this, it'll build the biggest business in the world by like a large factor.”
Assertion Supported
Adcock: No humanoid robot has demonstrated 7-10 failure-free autonomous hours daily
“I want to be able to put a robot into a home and be able to do, like, seven to 10 hours of work successfully without failures, with, like, to know, like, with no human intervention and do that every day forever. It's just, like, a hard problem. Nobody's ever s…”
Assertion Supported
Adcock: Figure placed the first humanoid robots in White House history
“We got a call asking to be basically the first humanoid group basically ever to put robots in the White House, and so last week we basically had the, you know, first robots in, humanoid robots in history there doing stuff, talking, greeting folks we were basic…”
Assertion Supported
Adcock: Project Vulcan prevents Figure robots from falling during leg joint failures
“We've been working on a project we call Vulcan here internally. That basically allows us to lose a single or even multiple joints in the legs and still not fall.”
Disclosure
Adcock: Figure Helix AI trained on under one million hours of data
“We've probably had in Helix, like the, like, in, like, kind of base, pre, and mid-training Helix models that we're working on now have maybe, like, maybe, like, a little under a million hours of total data. And then we also do from mid-training and pre-trainin…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adcock: Data is Figure's biggest blocker to large-scale humanoid deployment
“The biggest blocker for us now of going from where we're at today to, like large-scale deployment is data. We need, like, an enormous amount of data.”
Assertion Supported
Adcock: Figure-Assisted BMW X3 Is First Car Built by Humanoid Robot
“This is an X-III that we helped basically like we basically helped, the robot helped assemble it, and this was the first car in the world built by a humanoid robot that we're aware of.”
Disclosure
Adcock: Figure will ship humanoids onto its production line this year
“We're, we will be shipping robots, human, our humanoid robots into the production lines here this year”
Brett Adcock