Figure's Robotics Breakthrough for Humanoids

0:00With the football season underway, it's time to see how your predictions are shaping up CalShi America's number one prediction market platform let you trade those predictions in a live market Delay is trading at 53% to beat Denver meaning a hundred dollar trade pays out 183 with a win download CalShi use code heart to get $25 when you trade 25 18 plus only restrictions and eligibility apply trading involves risk not available in all jurisdictions prices values and markets make Different from those mentioned for more see calcie.com slash regulatory calcie trade on anything I just finished recording this full podcast episode and realized that my microphone was not turned on so I get to record it again And maybe I'll be more practiced or I'll add a little bit of extra insights in this hopefully it's even better if I talk really fast I've already said this all once so that's probably why today on the podcast I want to talk about the one of the biggest unlocks in humanoid robotics that we've seen to date a Massive technological breakthrough. So honestly something that I'm very excited about and this is all coming from

1:00Figure one of the biggest humanoid robot companies that's competing against Tesla's humanoid robot. There's a handful of others But figures one of the big leading ones right now. They've created basically a massive breakthrough that allows their robots to do generalist Work basically you take it and put it in a new environment and it's able to adapt now So I want to break down how they're able to accomplish this. They built some really incredible solutions to problems that no one else I guess maybe other people had these problems But before we get into all of that I wanted to mention that if you haven't already I would love for you go check out aibox.ai which is my very own startup where you can get access to over 90 different AI models And you can work with them all in the same chat thread if you're sick of paying subscriptions 20 dollars a month to 10 different platforms for audio image video generation You can get all of the best models from Google open AI and through up like all in one place And if you use something like clawed for Working something like clawed co-work you can actually get it to generate images right inside of clawed or video or audio

2:01With the aibox connector So it starts at eight dollars and 99 cents a month We have higher tiers if you have really big projects But I hope this is something that saves you a ton of time I recently had a project where I got it to generate 1300 images right inside of clawed It was able to do the whole project for me. I didn't have to mess around with it because it was using the aibox connector and when it did that I saw a massive spike in traffic to my website from that from that product and from that Project that worked on so if you want to give it a try There's a link in the description to aibox.ai All right, let's talk about what's going on with figure so yesterday There's CEO put out a tweet where he said hey, we have a massive Basically unlock that we're going to be sharing soon I was on pins and needles and today we got the drop about an hour ago And by the way if you're watching this on or if you're listening on Apple podcasts You can watch this on video we have video on Apple podcasts and I'll be sharing some clips from their actual robot What it's actually doing etc but for everyone else I'll explain So they released a new thing called helix 2.5

3:01This is their new AI model that is and a new update to their robots that let it do general purpose cleaning Meaning in the past the biggest problem that they had was that they could get their robot to clean a house in a Familiar environment that had been trained on right it and seen training data of this particular house And with particular objects that had already been trained on so if you threw a bunch of objects on the floor And the training data had those objects in it It could it knew how to pick up those objects off the floor But if you had new objects if you had new environments that it was unfamiliar with it was unable to do this So there's kind of this generalize issue where you could get it trained on specific environments But it didn't go to all environments They came up with a really creative solution which I will explain in a second But first I want to tell you the results of the solution The results of the solution were that they were able to take this And they they did a big update to and to test this out They rented 30 different Airbnb's across the Bay area So all homes that this robot that the figure robot had never seen before And they were been trained on before and they threw new objects in the home

4:02So they would throw toys all over the floor They would go mess up the beds beds had never seen they would go put piles of like laundry down It was able to go clean the house pick up all the toys make all the beds full of the laundry in completely different environments Where it had never seen these different objects before so this is the generalize Cleaning they were able to do this on 30 different homes to validate that this model actually works How are they able to get this result? This is what I was really excited about So the way that these models get their training data Typically and traditionally has been specifically for these robots There's a couple different ways one of them is through motion capture So essentially that's a person wearing a special kind of suit You use the same technology for a lot of animation But it's got little dots on the suit and you even have special gloves you can wear And you go and do a task with a camera Watching how you do everything with all of the sensors so it understands exactly how you move That can transfer to a robot really well The problem is what what I mentioned earlier where it's just specific environments with specific objects That it's really good at and that and if you wanted to get better

5:04You'd need a much bigger data set so figure actually went to a bunch of different suppliers and requested data sets from them One of the biggest is probably scale AI that you might be familiar with Scale AI is a company that Was purchased by meta and they I think were purchased about 50% of the company was purchased for two billion dollars They had the CEO of scale AI move over is now the CEO of meta AI And so this was a huge company that did a lot of training data for Open AI and for topic Google and a lot of meta and a lot of other players And of course was all the drama or when they had so acquisition and open AI said hey look We're not buying any more data from them because you know They're purchased by meta and it's a competitor. Yeah, yeah So there's a bunch of stuff that went on Scale AI specifically though wasn't just perhaps buying data What they were doing was annotating and labeling the data and they were doing it in bulk So the reason why the company was worth so much money They would go and get data and for example They would go and get like legal data Then they would have lawyers go and annotate the data and mark it up and say this thing means this

6:07This thing means this and kind of go and label it and they would do this with a lot of different industries a lot of different types of data Figure went to companies like scale AI and tried to say hey look We need a whole bunch of egocentric data egocentric data just means You wear basically a baseball cap and a camera that's pointing down usually just your smartphone works It points down it has to be able to see your hands if your hands are outside of the lens and the footage won't work But it's gonna see your hands and you go and do tasks so you would go and you know, clean your dishes You would go and you know do the laundry whatever and if your camera can see your tasks You can use this egocentric footage to train robot models companies like scale AI would go and gather this from people Build little data sets and sell them This is an industry that I'm quite familiar with because I'm working on a project for my own company It's called FIND.com FIUND so by the way if you have any sort of we specifically work with podcasting audio and video and image data sets So if you have any of those types of data sets if you have a podcast you've run for years Let us know go you know reach out to me. I'll leave a link in the description to my website FIND

7:11And we license that and we help you monetize it if you you know have data sets But in any case a figure went to these companies lots of third-party vendors including scale and said they said hey look like we need to buy This data and they said they couldn't get enough quantity So they were basically bottlenecked by not being able to get enough supply of this data So what did they do figure decided to go and just build their own product which is called index And figures index program is essentially where they will send you like a special A special camera and hat that you wear and if you're looking at this on on apple You can see like what this looks like it's kind of it's not really like a VR headset It's more like a band that goes around your head that there's a camera on the band. I mean it's basically just The way I mentioned it earlier with like the baseball cap and your and your phone is sort of a crude example that does work But like if you get bumped the wrong way it could mess it up And so with this headband it's able to you know just film you and they'll say hey go to your laundry go to your dishes And they'll pay you for doing that now. There's a lot of different monetization methods with this and

8:15They have a lot of different types of places that are capturing this data for them but the But essentially what they were able to Do with this index programs they now have four thousand people a day that are submitting Content to their data set they couldn't get a big enough data set So they literally had to go build their own custom solution where you can order one of these headbands go to your work And you get paid for them I've heard about programs like this from a number of different companies There's shift that went viral recently because they said hey look we're cleaning your house for free If you let the cleaners where one of these hats with a camera on it so that you know it's training data for cleaning There's a lot of different ways to do this But at the end of the day no one was able to get it at the volume that figure needed so they built their own solution The figure index and now they have four thousand contributors They took all of that data I think they said they have 64,000 app downloads they have 16 million videos that have been uploaded from 108 different countries And they said that they've paid out 15 million dollars to creators So you could go today and join the index program and make money as far as the payments and I mean

9:18I would say go go look into this. This is interesting There's all sorts of tasks people doing you know bring in their groceries doing the taking out the trash washing their car washing their stove like raking rocks I mean there's all sorts of tasks that are picking strawberries on their website inside of machine shops folding pizza boxes doing laundry making case ideas like all sorts of tasks are Demoed on their website So there's a lot of different things that you can do here that being said from a lot of the estimates that I was seeing They're paying like a dollar for a five minute video so if you're like you know If you go take out your trash it's like a dollar if you go do this It's a dollar in some cases it could be worth a lot of money I saw other places that were just kind of paying $20 an hour which by the way They would go to find like warehouse workers and say like hey, you know your warehouse worker Make in 25 bucks an hour. We'll pay you another $20 an hour just to wear this like headband camera around with you Well, you do it And I think a lot of people would take that out now they make $45 an hour and so it makes you know a lot of sense So figure was able to take all of this data that they now have and the the model is you know

10:18Not being trained. There's not like some big breakthrough and how they're doing it They were just able to get better data They put all of this data in and this is basically what the big unlock was for them So now the figure robots are able to go around and clean houses in completely new environments That they've never seen before and they've got they've basically unlocked this generalized cleaning So where does or generalized work? Where does this go in the future? I think a lot of the data set that they have right now is people around their house just random people I think they're going to get more into specialized data sets This is where they're going to have to focus So they might say like hey, we're going to It's theoretically possible that they could say hey look we're saturated on cleaning the house our robot is the greatest house cleaner in the world We don't want anymore laundry folding videos we beg you please stop There's a chance it would say that I think they'll just keep collecting data and just making an absolutely astronomical data set I think the cost for them is nominal compared to what this what this could unlock for them And so but I think where this will go in the future is they're going to you know inevitably put a bigger focus on like

11:19Trying on board people into their index program that are like mechanics again a bunch of mechanics shops on Maybe they'll make a deal with O'Reilly auto parts and have you know O'Reilly mandate that all of the mechanics need to wear this or they'll go in with You know like Walmart shelf stalkers or you can imagine that they would have kind of like some corporate Partnerships that they would create and then I think they'll just go and find specialized industries where people are doing very specialized things like an AC and HVAC person They'll have electricians go in eventually with this method And they'll be able to train humanoid robots to be able to do a lot of this work Where does this go in the future? This is something I've been talking about for about two years Like if you know me I've been saying that this is coming that AI and a chatbot is not the end of it the end of it is humanoid robots Because for up until now robots have always had this problem where you know they got wheels on their feet or they Zip around a warehouse picking up palettes and crates and you train the robot based off of you know basically Basically for a very specific task and very specific environment And it's hard to get it to do much more than that. Just generalized

12:21It's kind of like artificial general intelligence. It's we've got that for robots now and how they've been able to unlock it It's just way more training data because these humanoid robots I also heard people say like surely you can come to the better form factor why are we doing humanoid robots? Why don't we just make robots that are like special shapes? It's because of the training data We can just give them videos about humans do things and humans have built the entire world for humans right like The way that the the height of a doorknob the way that you open your car like everything is built for a human So it would make perfect sense that a robot that's the most useful Just looks and acts exactly like human it can be trained off of the exact same data set So I think they're going to be purchasing more I mean, they're going to be putting more investments into this They said specifically on all of this that they're going to budget over two billion dollars a year on compute For training these models and training these robots. So there's going to be a way There's going to be some massive investments that are coming into it from that end And I think we can just expect all of this to accelerate what these robots are going to be capable of doing and the industries that they will go into

13:22Now what does this mean? I know a lot of people have kind of said like I don't know in in alarmist ways It's kind of the end of jobs and what are we going to do when the robots you know take over and they're doing everything for us This is my opinion is yes, we'll have a lot of robots doing a lot of things But at the end of the day just like chat gpt in and of itself isn't doing your job for you It's not running your business for you. You're still sitting there managing it Even if you have agents doing things you have to monitor your agents You have to set up your workflows you have to optimize them when something breaks It's going to be the same thing with robots. I think in you know at the end of the day That you're always going to need a person and an organization to oversee the robots to manage what they're doing I think there's a lot of interesting Concepts that I've been talking about for a long time and it feels like they're getting a lot closer One of them being you can imagine something like a landscaping company where you have a Tesla cyber cab Again getting very you know or or just a Tesla has self-driving You have a robot go into there with like imagine you just give an electric lawnmower to one of these robots

14:23You have it go into a cyber cab and is this economically viable better question But also is all of the tokens that a lot of these companies spend on anthropic credits to rebuild software economically viable There's also a debate there that maybe people are overspending But regardless you could give an electric lawnmower to one of these robots stick in a cyber cab Have it drive around and let's say you had a lawn care business. It could go do your lawn care route for you So I mean this is pretty interesting now what what you know who's liable if something goes wrong If it actually mose over your rose bed, you know, there's like a bunch of theoretical problems where you might want to have a real human there And maybe you just have your robot to go and do things quickly while you're going and managing and watching it So I don't know what the oversight of these things are. I don't know how remote control works I don't know where this gets to but you can imagine there will be full businesses that are running with these robots to the to the point where I think there's a lot of There's a lot of the boomer or there's a lot of the baby boomer generation right that is retiring and selling businesses I mean, it's kind of a famous joke or a famous like thing in in private equity where you know

15:26You're gonna go and buy some some guys, you know, HVAC company where he's got or you're gonna roll up like 100 HVAC guys companies into like a big HVAC Conglomerate and the specific city and you're gonna run them all more efficiently yada yada I mean, there's a lot of these people that have run companies for a long time and they're retiring You can imagine the new business move here would be go take over someone's HVAC company and if you don't want to go do Preventative maintenance on AC units yourself. You don't want to go and get on the roof of red robin with a hose and spray out all their air filters You could just get a robot to go do that So you could acquire this company and have the robot go and do a lot of the the work You probably have a camera on that thing where you can review the work at the end of the day make sure everything looks good Send out the bill and it could be like this a new kind of sort of automated business This isn't for every industry and there's a lot of things which probably you know are very tricky complex problems That you want human solving But there's a lot of the mundane stuff that that This these robots could actually do so I think this is a fascinating time in to be alive

16:31I mean undoubtedly there is so much more that's gonna be coming out We're at the cutting edge. I mean no one has these robots yet. These are just the concepts and the tools that are being built But you can imagine this is a Absolutely colossal. I mean when we talk about when we talk about like productivity being unlocked Humanoid robots are going to be it there. I mean you get the AI the intelligence from something like astra or open AI or Claude and you stick it into these robots there is you know that I mean that unlocks so much and you kind of get past this issue That I think we have where you need to Where you need to hire mass amounts of people to do like low-skill labor or low-pay labor Like you think of like warehouses and factories. I think a lot of that will be done by robot So what happens to jobs? What happens to the people that gets displaced by this? I mean there's a lot of questions that go into it But at the end of the day when the washing machine when the dishwasher was invented I'm sure people that were washing it by hand Complained but at the end of the day now they run the big industrial dishwasher

17:33And the restaurant can make more money and have more profits and you know that Jobs shift around so it'll be interesting to see what happens in the shift But the end of the day we will as a society undoubtedly become more productive with all of this guys This is a fascinating episode. Thank you so much for tuning in if you enjoyed this episode number one If you have any sort of data set if you have a podcast if you know someone with a podcast Send them my way to find f-i-u-n-d.com I would love to help evaluate it and Help them monetize their data set if that's something that they're interested in and Number two go check out my startup a-i box dot a-i if you want to get access to every a-i model in one place For eight dollars and 99 cents a month. All right. I'll catch you guys all in the next episode With the football season underway It's time to see how your predictions are shaping up CalShi America's number one prediction market platform Let you trade those predictions in a live market L.A. is trading at 53% to beat Denver Meaning a hundred dollar trade pays out 183 with a win download CalShi

18:35Use code heart to get twenty five dollars when you trade 25 18 plus only restrictions and eligibility apply trading involves risk not available in all Your restrictions prices values and markets make differ from those mentioned for more ccalshi.com slash regulatory CalShi trade on anything