Figure AI#12

Mike Kalil@mikekalilmfg

UPS reportedly wants to buy “tens of thousands” of humanoid robots from Figure AI to work in its logistics facilities. Reports about the $39 billlion San Jose startup working with UPS have been around for about a year. The startup appears to be pushing the latest development story through investors. As previously reported, UPS plans to eliminate up to 30,000 jobs in 2026. Like Amazon, Figure is looking to autonomous robots to fill replace human workers.

Mike Kalil@mikekalilmfg

Figure AI CEO on "Firing" OpenAI: "We just got like no value out of the whole relationship." Figure founder Brett Adcock brought a Figure 03 to Shawn Ryan's podcast, where he went into detail about the startup's early relationship with OpenAI that dissolved a year after it started. Adcock, who previously founded Archer Aviation, said the arrangement was useful for fundraising at first but not much else. "We just found that the team we had internally. We just ran like kind of circles around them like every day," he said. The breaking point came when he learned that OpenAI planned to restart its robotics program. That meant Figure's engineers would essentially be teaching a competitor. “We’re like teaching you how to do robot learning… you’re seeing our progress," he said. "There’s no way we’re going to teach you how to do this stuff anymore.” It was Adcock's first appearance for a podcaster who's not a Figure AI investor since the split. It was recorded around the time First Lady Melania Trump welcomed the $39 billion startup's third-generation robot, the Figure 03, at the White House for a summit on technology and education. Figure AI has developed its own vision-language-action model called Helix.

Lukas Ziegler@lukas_m_ziegler

🚨 BREAKING: BMW Group and @Figure_robot just took their partnership to the next level. Figure 03 is now live at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg. Figure 02 ran for 11 months at Spartanburg, supporting the production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles. Inserting sheet-metal parts for welding: high speed, high accuracy, physically demanding. In a real factory. Every day. Now Figure 03 is tackling something harder: complex sequencing in logistics: → Components arrive unsorted in large containers → Figure 03 picks and sorts them into sequencing trolleys → Trolleys are transported to collection points → Parts delivered to assembly workers just-in-sequence This use case is everywhere in automotive manufacturing. Figure 03 also ships with meaningful hardware upgrades over its predecessor like improved hands with tactile sensors and palm cameras, wireless charging for higher availability, soft components for enhanced safety, and speech-to-speech audio communication. BMW is building an entirely new Center of Competence for Physical AI in Production and rolling out humanoids in Germany for the first time too. 🇩🇪 Congrats @adcock_brett! Read more here: https://t.co/hu5TiAdUMt ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → https://t.co/GoA3ZuwWF9

Stephanie Palazzolo ✈️ ICML@steph_palazzolo

New: Brett Adcock, the CEO of robotics startup Figure AI, is starting a new AI lab called Hark, which will be funded by $100M of his personal capital. The startup aims to build "human-centric AI" and Adcock will also remain in his position at Figure. https://t.co/qWDZ7k6hqp

Irvin (in Japan 🇯🇵)@irvinxyz

Ok fine. I’ll say it. The reason why I don’t like Figure AI is not because the founder is acting like a dumbass. It’s because Brett is not a technical founder. Building humanoids is every child’s dream who watched Gundam, Transformers or Battlebots and then grew up to attend engineering school and learned the complexities of building a hardware software system. Building humanoid robots is more than just running a “business venture”, it’s a dream for many — a goal, a lifetime achievement. This is why when he speaks, he talks mostly about the business (runway and cash burn rates), instead of speaking about technology multipliers or the lack of breakthroughs. Dull statements that don’t signal passion for the goal of putting humanoid robots into the wild. Bernt Børnich and even Elon Musk are technical enough to navigate the waters of technical uncertainty in robotics and are passionate enough about this goal to the drive business of building humanoids forward. American Robotics needs more technical people — it needs the nerds from the rocket and science club in high school and middle school, the ones who will risk it all to achieve this goal, the ones who have spent sleepless nights thinking about these problems or dreaming about solutions. Needless to say I applaud Brett for being great at his craft — a top business person / entrepreneur and hope that Figure AI, as an American company, does well. America needs more successful humanoid robotics companies.

kache@yacineMTB

The amount of seemingly fraud at figure AI is pretty crazy. I am not accusing them of fraud I'm just saying it seems pretty.. fake If they would only sell a product, then we would know it's real. I wonder why they don't