Source: Sourcery with Molly O'Shea

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

The humanoid robot company Figure is dedicated to building a universal humanoid robot capable of performing human jobs, whether in factory workshops or at home. In multiple rounds of funding including Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon, its valuation has grown 15 times in just 18 months, reaching 39 billion dollars. This episode of the Sourcery podcast will take a deep dive into Figure's headquarters for a comprehensive tour and an in-depth interview with Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure, about the future of robots, AI, and employment.

Brett shared reasons for why humanoid robots are now operational, how Figure plans to scale its production from thousands to one million units annually this year, and why he believes Figure has the potential to become the largest company in the world. In funding rounds that included Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon, Figure's valuation has increased 15 times in just 18 months, reaching 39 billion dollars. There was also a discussion about Brett's decision to leave OpenAI, the challenges faced in constructing physical AI, and the conditions required to solve one of the most challenging problems in engineering. PANews has compiled this podcast.

Host: What is your hot take on the current robotics field?

Brett: I think we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on full autonomy and end-to-end solutions. When you walked in, you asked us a few questions, like "Is this remote operated?" We’re not remotely operating these things. I believe our view on robotics is that it’s challenging to understand what’s happening in the field without coming on-site to see what we’re doing firsthand. So I hope you enjoy the experience today and see everything we're working on. I think my hottest take is: we just want humanoid robots to really work, and they are already working now. Robots can handle everyday tasks like cleaning the living room or conducting business operations. It’s really cool to see this happening over the next few years.

Host: This is a very competitive field and it's getting more competitive. How do you feel in the face of this competition? What are your goals?

Brett: Our internal goal is how to enable these robots to do real jobs and get compensated for it. So we are very focused on how to achieve autonomous useful work, which is our standard. We need to excel in this task with the AI model, and we also need good hardware. It has to be cost-effective and capable of mass-producing robots. I think we are currently a few years ahead of everyone else at this level globally. We are still in the early chapters of the humanoid robot book. I hope the next step is how to push out more robots to the market at scale; we want to be the first to do that.

How do you get hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of robots running every day in the world? This field is still early. We are like the first stage of humanoid robots entering society at scale. What excites us internally the most is: it’s working; this is just the first stage. The second stage is rolling out more robots and having them work at a larger scale. After that, we hope to truly generalize to do everything humans can do.

Host: How many do you plan to produce in a year? What is the target?

Brett: This year we will produce thousands of robots here at the fastest pace possible. We are accelerating the BotQ production line full throttle. We set a production record in March and plan to triple that in May; we will produce thousands. We already have ready parts and are ramping up production. From there, we want to move to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and we hope to reach one million units per year. At the same time, we need to match this speed with business progress. We have a lot of commercial demand. If the robots are ready now, I believe I could place large numbers of robots with commercial customers today. The biggest gap is enabling the robots to operate autonomously at scale.

Host: So what is the current bottleneck in commercialization?

Brett: It is having enough robots and getting them to reach human-level performance at scale. We don’t want to push a thousand robots to the market and then run into a thousand problems every hour. That’s not good for anyone. Last year we delivered a small batch of robots to BMW, and they have been working every day for six months, performing excellently. We learned a lot from it and restructured our entire approach to commercial software and the AI system. This also led us to develop Helix 2. This is the second generation AI model that was just released a few months ago. The question now is how to deploy these robots to many different customers; we may announce a lot of relevant news in the next 90 days, and this year we will deploy them at a considerable scale. If things go smoothly, we will continue to expand aggressively. The performance of the robots we deployed last year was great, and we learned a lot. This year we will have more robots deployed to many different customers. If things go well, we will continue to expand aggressively.

Host: Figure has been established for less than four years; how did you expand so quickly? What was the process?

Brett: Yes, I have been an entrepreneur for about 20 years. I used to grow and sell a software company quickly and rapidly took Archer public. So whenever I reach this stage, I look back and think: what have I learned from past experiences? How can I do better? At Figure, we have taken a very differentiated approach, essentially vertically integrating the design of everything. I believe no other company in the world has designed more parts on robotics hardware than we have. We design our own motors, rotors, stators, sensors, structures, kinematics, joints, and batteries. This allows us to control our own destiny and build our own supply chain. Without this, you can only rely on suppliers; what do you do if something goes wrong? Can you understand it? Can you fix it? Can you patch it? So we understand the entire tech stack from top to bottom. In the beginning, we put a tremendous amount of effort into getting the right people on board. Now we have iterated to have a quite reliable system that runs well.

I self-funded from the beginning, burning cash at a rate of $1 million a month within four months, which is no joke. We built a team of 40 in four to five months, and they are all very talented. Then we would work 100-hour weeks just to get this done with the team. We made some mistakes, learned a lot, and did some things right by continually iterating and improving.

Host: Why did you leave Archer?

Brett: The meta question in the field of robotics is whether we can solve the humanoid robot issue. If you can solve it, it will become the biggest business in the world by a large margin. Nearly half of the global GDP is human labor. I wanted to dedicate myself to building this robot technology's "Holy Grail." At Archer, I was responsible for the design of all our aircraft. I believe this decade, we will bring humanoid robots to the masses. This could be one of the most important businesses of our lives. So now I can spend time in one of the most important fields of my career. I built the entire team at Archer, led all engineering design, and helped take the company public. Now the aircraft are in a good position to be certified and enter federal airspace. And Figure is also in a good position to really scale physical intelligence.

Host: Why did you decide to start another company and fund it after the IPO?

Brett: Actually, I founded a few companies afterwards. In short, I have been focused on humanoid robotics for decades. But humanoid robots have always been going in the wrong direction, building the wrong things, or just doing it as a hobby; engineering decisions, in my opinion, were also not right. I felt that someone needed to significantly accelerate the development of this field. Four years ago, the best products were still Boston Dynamics' hydraulic humanoid robot Atlas. It was leaking oil everywhere, could only run for 20 minutes, was big and unsafe, and could not be placed next to humans, using traditional control methods. Boston Dynamics has a strong research background, but their commercialization is not as strong. So I felt there needed to be a company that truly brings humanoid robots to the mass market. Without my involvement, I’m not sure we would have gotten to this point. Figure has already proven that we’ve significantly advanced the timeline.

Host: You recently gained a lot of attention due to your comments about the partnership with OpenAI; what happened?

Brett: Two years ago, OpenAI led our Series B round, and they brought in Microsoft. As part of the collaboration, we signed an agreement for joint development of the next-generation AI model. We spent about a year collaborating to research how to make AI models work on humanoid robots and how to implement language models effectively in humanoid robots. They are very interested in robotics, and we also wanted to better understand the role of language models in robots.

We collaborated with them for a year, and they are all great people. I worked with them almost every day or week. Later, our internal team designing models left OpenAI behind. We did better in testing and training models on robots. My team has more than ten years of experience in robotic learning. Ultimately, I disconnected the collaboration.

Host: Why did you let them invest initially?

Brett: I thought there might be great strategic synergy potential between both parties to learn from each other. But it turned out I was wrong about that.

Host: Did you strengthen security measures early on? Because I had to have my phone taken when I came in, there are many restricted areas, and you are very strict about IP address protection.

Brett: We have always placed a significant emphasis on security. I feel there is a high IP address risk in what we are doing, so we are very cautious in areas like engineering CAD and software, strictly controlling from both network security and internal security perspectives. Our office is actually quite open; you can see a lot of things when you come in. But in the Bay Area, there are many spies and baiting. One day, we noticed a drone hovering outside the window in the corner of the office, looking into the office. We immediately strengthened all security measures. Now we are very strict on both physical and digital security.

Host: As a leader, how do you maintain your expressiveness and team leadership?

Brett: My life has three time pockets: family, work, and friends. But five years ago, I found it impossible to balance all three, so I decided to give up annual golf trips and dinners with friends I hadn't seen in ten years. I now only spend time on my family and my company.

I go home by 6 PM every night for dinner with my kids, put them to bed, and then return to the office to work if necessary. I focus on solving the most challenging problems in the company and helping it expand. I now sit in an open office area instead of a corner office. I spend most of my time on product and engineering, which are what really matter, rather than traditional PR, attending trade shows, and so on.

Host: What is the biggest risk in this business?

Brett: The humanoid robot thing is really hard. I even find it difficult to explain clearly. Getting the robots to do what we demonstrated today has almost driven me to the brink. We have a long way to go. The biggest risk is whether we can achieve effective long-term end-to-end working: placing a robot in a home and making it operate continuously for 7-10 hours without faults and without human intervention, day in and day out, forever. No one has ever done that before. The hardware is extremely complex; we designed the entire supply chain from scratch. The failure rate must be very low, costs must be low enough to mass-produce, and consumers must really want them.

Host: You have raised nearly 2 billion dollars, with a valuation of 39 billion dollars; do you think capital or valuation is a risk?

Brett: This will become the biggest business in the world. Close to half of the GDP in the commercial sector is comprised of human labor salaries. If robots can do well, we can deploy billions of robots and create trillions of dollars in revenue. Tech companies typically have valuations of 10-20 times revenue, which would make this a trillion-dollar super business.

Host: Finally, what are you most looking forward to this year?

Brett: This year, I want to deliver robots to the world at scale. The second thing is to solve what I call the "general robot" problem: a robot that can do everything a human can do. We have extensive focus on Helix and hope this will become the first place to see AGI in the physical world. We believe we have the right recipe and training process. This year and next year will be crucial for us to break through this point.

Related reading: Humanoid Robot 11 Application Guidelines: China Leads Globally, Who is Making Money, and Who is Still in Pilot?

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