The Ledger
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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.”
Brett Adcock says he terminated Figure's AI collaboration agreement with OpenAI
“And so I fired him.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
Figure is not teleoperating its humanoid robots, says founder Brett Adcock
“We're not teleoperating this stuff.”
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.”
Adcock: Humanoid Robotics Is an Intelligence Problem, Not Manufacturing
“In my mind, this is not a manufacturing problem. This is an intelligence problem.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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”
Adcock: Figure's current humanoid robots cost well under $100,000 each
“So this was like hundreds of thousands of dollars and the robots we have now are like you know, well under a 100,000 dollars each.”
Adcock: Figure reduced robot costs by 90% between Figure 2 and 3
“We reduced the cost by about 90% between these two.”
Adcock: Figure's next-generation hand has as many joints as a human hand
“We recently unveiled our high degree of freedom hand as a teaser, our next generation hand about a month ago. And this hand has basically a human level dexterity, like as many joints in the hand as a human.”
Adcock: Figure will build thousands of robots this year, has parts in-house
“We'll make thousands of robots Over the, like here, like basically as fast as we can this year. So we're ramping Bocu, like, lines up as fast as we can. We had record production in March, and we're gonna try to three X that by May, and we'll build thousands of…”
Adcock: Figure designs more robot parts in-house than any competitor
“I don't think there's any group in the world that I wouldn't think on the robotic side that makes the designs more parts than we do on the robot. We design the motors, basically every part within there, the rotor stator, everything.”
Adcock: NASA JPL tech detects concealed weapons from 20 meters away
“There's a technology that was designed at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab about a decade ago that it can detect weapons underneath clothes and in backpacks and bags from, like 10, 20, you know, five, 10, 20 meters away. And they built it for the Iraq-Afghanistan war t…”
Adcock: Figure 3 faults weekly compared to Figure 1 faulting hourly
“Like we used to run that robot here, figure, figure one, and man, that robot could like run for like an hour and it would like fault. We know all the reasons or it would fall or would like, you know, lose power. And, you know, we moved to figure two. I think w…”
Adcock believes Figure has the recipe to achieve physical AGI
“I want this to be the first place where we see see AGI in the physical world. And we think we have the recipe and we think we have like the right training processes in place to do this. We and this will be an important, this year and next will be important to …”
Adcock: Figure humanoid robots charge wirelessly at 2 kW with 5-hour runtime
“The robots can charge through their feet at two kilowatts. So basically, like the battery lasts about four to five hours, then we can charge basically for an hour and go back and do work again.”
Adcock: Figure runs onboard neural network inference hundreds of times per second
“And we have to do that like a few hundred times a second from camera images and on a neural network that runs on board the robot.”
Adcock: Figure's robot hardware is robust; most failures are software and AI
“We're at a point where the hardware's gotten, like, pretty, like, almost, like, very robust. Like, the, we can run them all day, every day, like we still, we see, we still see, like, hardware failures, but It's very few and far between. Most of our problems no…”
Adcock: Figure robots run Helix AI inference onboard without network connectivity
“We run Helix on board. So they're actually loaded into GPUs on board and memory, and we run inference on board. Meaning if we if we lose internet connection, we can still do housework and logistics.”
Adcock: Figure Deployed Robots for Six Months on BMW Body Shop Line
“We work at BMW, and last year we deployed for six months robots on the basically body shop factory line to build cars.”
Adcock: Figure got its first robot walking within a year
“We have our figure one robot. It's kind of gnarly. It's got wires everywhere. It's our first generation. We had that walking before we were a year old, and we think it's probably one of the fastest times in human history.”
Adcock: Tendon-driven robotic hand was the wrong engineering choice for Figure
“And it ended up becoming ended up becoming like the wrong engineering choice.
And we ended up pivoting away from it really early.”
Adcock: Eliminating casual socializing allows total focus on family and companies
“I decided, like, five years ago to, like, stop doing like the annual golf trip and stop doing like this person's in town. I haven't seen in 10 years. We need to go out to dinner. I just don't do that anymore. I spend all my time with family or my companies. Th…”
Adcock: Figure has 500 total employees, 250-300 at HQ
“There's about 253 hundred people here, and we have 500 in the company.”
Adcock: Figure's humanoid has over 40 moving joints and in-house supply chain
“Like the robot has 40 plus moving joints. It's like a walking cell phone, self-driving car. All the supply chain is basically new. We've designed almost all of it.”
Adcock: Figure robots dock at 10-15% battery and swap within 30 seconds
“We dock it, like, yeah, around 10 to 15%, they'll go to dock, and then if we need another robot in, we'll sub them in off the dock, and you'll see here later, you know, like, logistics and other use cases that need, like, constant, like, 24 seven attention, th…”
Adcock: Figure designs over 100 custom PCBs for its robot
“We designed almost there's over a hundred PCBs that we design here on the robot that we do on that team.”