Huge funding round makes “Figure” Big Tech’s favorite humanoid robot company

Investors Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and Intel value Figure at $2.6B.

See full article...

 

[pi.squared]

This thing looks like a tin piece of crap right now but in less than a decade it will be replacing all those black Tesla plant workers Elon Musk seems to hate so much. I think, if anything we should start laying the groundwork for a Universal Basic Income, because the writing is kind of on the wall at this point for factory jobs.

Where will the money to pay for UBI cone from?

 

[ajpope85]

When you talk about a UBI, where do you plan on getting the money? Tax the rich? There isn't enough money there. Tax corporations? Corporations don't pay taxes. They just add it to the cost of doing business and the consumer pays it.

Derivative markets alone are worth hundreds of trillions of dollars.

 

[ajpope85]

Where will the money to pay for UBI cone from?

The same place all money comes from.

 

[ajpope85]

It would be then interesting to see some specific analysis of why this is the efforts of charlatans. A lot of the comments come across as jaded and ad hominen.

The support costs alone. In order for these robots to be generalized enough to do things outside of very specific tasks, they're going to require very robust infrastructure to data centers, and data centers are hungry things.

Interpreting and interacting with the outside world, much less having to make very quick decisions on those interactions is going to be very, very, very computationally heavy. This isn't generating some bullshit text, imagery, or audio based on one time inputs. It's interpreting all three at once, in real time, on top of spacial and other sensory inputs, all at the same time, then making a decision on all the inputs, then outputting that decision while all the inputs are constantly changing. And that's just one robot. Imagine managing that for tens, hundreds, or thousands of them.

 

[EternalStudent07]

I don't understand the goal of being as limited as a human. Meaning creating a robot that can do anything a person can do, sure that's useful... but why force legs when it obviously slows movement? Why not a centaur like setup, but with a car body... or Segway like balancing 2 wheel (or 3?) base?

And why force any "vision" to be from eyes in the head? Why not have lots of cameras in the room and allow the processing to be done while it moves from A to B, deciding on the next move before it actually reaches the new start point.

And why 4 fingers + 1 thumb? Seems many types of gripping structures could be possible, and maybe more reliable for certain jobs. Like where you have 1 kind of bin/box, then you can use a specialized gripper/claw.

Anyway, I'm really good at polishing armor (for our new robot overlords). And I hope our politics + economics change to meet the dwindling need we have for human labor. Or I guess I hope I'm part of the "winners" (like everybody else does), and that we can quickly move on from the great dying or whatever they'll call this.

 

[chaos215bar2]

If we accept the axiom that population growth in the style or scheme of a pyramid is strictly necessary for growth, prosperity, and happiness, that's not that bad for a rich country!

South Korea and China are presently going to do quite a bit worse than that.

Checking Google, Germany is at 1.54 births per woman. South Korea is at 0.84. With population change being an exponential, that's a biiiig difference. South Korea is looking at more than a halving of population per generation. And as others have mentioned, no rich country has found a 'solution' to bring birth rates back up. Handing out money, handing out generous pat/mat leaves, nothing seems to make people actually have 2.1 kids. Polls show that people want more kids than they have, but reality shows that life seems to get in the way, even in countries where the government tries to help a lot.

The thing is, all these “solutions” are really just stopgaps to addressing the real problem. The problem being, people want more out of life than just education, work, and kids.

How about a mandatory 4-day work week? 6 weeks vacation? An actual, guaranteed livable wage? And most importantly, a society that’s willing to step in and help people take care of their children so that making the choice to foster the next generation doesn’t mean placing your entire life on hold for years?

These hardly seem like outlandish asks that would bring the modern economy to its knees. The problem is, as a society, we’re still stuck in a mindset where economic growth is the metric by which we insist on measuring success.

I would wager that if we figured out how to take all of our technological progress and turn it to benefit people rather than the increasingly concentrated capital that we allow to have undue influence over all aspects of society, focusing on human wellbeing as the most important metric by which to judge our success, the problem of population stagnation would largely solve itself. Because, as you say, people want kids. We just insist on making the cost so high that many people choose to forgo that fundamental part of the human experience entirely.

 

[squid_whisperer]

Why the focus on humanoid robots? Even if factories and warehouses are replete with stairs, making wheels unsuitable, I'm not sure there's a need for a human shape. Why a head? Is that to make it friendlier or something to humans it might work alongside? An R-series astromech droid feels like it's built for industrial purposes (as a close second, the first thing R2 is built for is plot). This robot doesn't need to be a human to leverage human-like hands. So is there a purpose to the shape I'm missing?

A lot of our infrastructure, tools etc are built for human shaped operators. So instead of replacing the whole process or machine in order to automate the task, you could far easier automate it by dropping in a humanoid, if you had one that worked sufficiently well. This also means that one humanoid can potentially automate dozens of tasks, that might only need to be performed occasionally but are still essential.

 

[Zeddgc]

Birds don’t have reversed knees. What you think is a knee is actually the ankle joint.

 

[Mentil]

The taxes on profits only seems fine, it just needs to be steeper.

The laser-focus on taxing 'profits' is why stock buybacks are so common now. Net income and capital gains should be what's given the most attention at this point.

 

[Geebs]

There are a lot of people who's jobs and livelihoods depend on requiring humans to do it. Factory workers, truckers, many types of drivers. A lot of work stands to be displaced by automated robots. People will fight it because the negative affects will likely come far, far sooner for them than the positives. And many have kids to feed and mortgages to pay. Overall, in the broader scheme of things, automated labor will raise the baseline for humanity and advance society as a whole. But a lot of people will disproportionately be affected, and those voices will surely be the loudest.

It still boils down to, once all the people are out of work, who do we suppose all these robots going to make things for? Why are we even making all these things in the first place?

 

[Snarky Robot]

I agree with the folks questioning the utility of a human form. If you wanted to build a robot to cook, the human form is less than ideal, with only two limbs. Being able to stir, flip 6 things at a time, with automated, machine-precision diving etc. would be the better product. And impossible for a humanoid robot.

I’ll say the exact same thing about this robot as I did about Tesl’s efforts: I’m not convinced yet. Maybe all these companies have special insights, but the easiest parts of this stuff always come first. The struggle is not in doing what others have done before, but in solving new problems.

The coolest thing here seems to be the hands, and as far as differentiating features, that’s quite useful. But it’s going to be a while before I crown this thing the new leader in robotics.

 

[Stickmansam]

The thing is, all these “solutions” are really just stopgaps to addressing the real problem. The problem being, people want more out of life than just education, work, and kids.

How about a mandatory 4-day work week? 6 weeks vacation? An actual, guaranteed livable wage? And most importantly, a society that’s willing to step in and help people take care of their children so that making the choice to foster the next generation doesn’t mean placing your entire life on hold for years?

These hardly seem like outlandish asks that would bring the modern economy to its knees. The problem is, as a society, we’re still stuck in a mindset where economic growth is the metric by which we insist on measuring success.

I would wager that if we figured out how to take all of our technological progress and turn it to benefit people rather than the increasingly concentrated capital that we allow to have undue influence over all aspects of society, focusing on human wellbeing as the most important metric by which to judge our success, the problem of population stagnation would largely solve itself. Because, as you say, people want kids. We just insist on making the cost so high that many people choose to forgo that fundamental part of the human experience entirely.

Agreed based on my personal experience

1. My partner has her career on hold while she is on leave. While she does get full pay while on leave, she isn't advancing her career like her childless colleagues are.

2. I don't get full paid leave. Taking care of a child is stressful and draining. If I am not arround, someone else has to help out instead. If there is no extended family, this means expensive childcare, or taking a hit to income from me taking a leave.

3. Childcare is expensive and difficult to find and ones available may not be a good fit.

4. Lifestyle change. This one is massive as it impacts everything from housing, transportation, social life, vacations, and so on. Beyond direct changes, the loss of personal time is massive.

5. Children are expensive, very expensive.

6. Children are exponentially more difficult the more you have in my experience. While there are cost savings from hand me downs, the additional stress and drain only builds from there. Having more than two accures additional costs and changes and hitting 2.1 means some people need 3.

7. Colic, my god I am not surprised there are not more parental suicides. I previously wanted 3 kids but after surviving a colicy infant, 3 is never ever going to happen. This is before all the other myriad non-financial challenges of raising a child.

 

[TechnologyDinosaur]

Pardon the pure optimism a few moments more... but a world with mass solar power, absorbing the suns energy, powering batteries, robots maintaining almost all of these devices and recharging themselves, helping to farm, clean, do dangerous work, deliver food, build buildings, repair roads, synthetic materials nearly as good as wood and non-renewable resources... The transition to this world will be like the integration of the internet into society. Rife with problems and vulnerabilities, but would we ever go back to a world without it?

That sounds great and all, but real humans, billions of them, have their entire short lives built around the current system. Some VC firm shouting "surprise!" and removing jobs one by one until we decades later are at a point where it finally applies to everyone is a recipe for mass unemployment.

I was in the graphic desig industry before. The digital version. When print died and the market was flooded with job seekers nobody gave a shit. We just got slowly mass unemployed over a period of two years. There was no magic solution.

The same boiling frog effect will happen here. Over several decades of cascading economic turmoil. We're going to have our lives ruined so some dipshit 100 years in the future can lounge around. I vote no to sacrificing my short life for them. There has to be another way to transition to this than relying on the mercy of profit seeking companies (they have no mercy)

 

[johnsonwax]

So, you'll notice that these kinds of robotic efforts are very US-centric.

The fundamental problem as I see it is that we've taken this attitude - also with autonomous cars - that because everything is currently designed around human interaction, that all automated solutions need to conform to this historical reality, rather than changing the infrastructure and logistics to accommodate automation, as had been done in the past. Containerization replaced stevedores, and rather than build a solution around the humans that loaded/unloaded cargo, they built a solution around rail and trucks. A lot of things then conformed to the new containerization.

The obvious solution to autonomous cars isn't a billion lines of code and a half dozen sensors per car to read a traffic signal, it's infrastructure changes that broadcast the signal state. The whole point of autonomous cars is to conform to the infrastructure (which is why the outrage that speed limiters would be proposed by legislatures, when every autonomous car is a speed limiter, definitionally, which usually all of these parties seek out. What's the point of a 0-60 in 3s car when your software will never do it faster than 9s.)

The solution to most of these automation problems is to simply change how things are packaged and the logistics around them, with an eye toward last-mile for consumers. The industry needs to do a better job standing up to consumers, which will be an increasingly greater need as we work to address climate change. A lot of your single use plastic packaging is simply going to have to go, and you can complain about it all you want, but people are going to have to suck it up.

But if you're going to automate warehousing, then design your logistics around that automation. You don't have to put 100% of the burden on a robot perfectly matching the capabilities of the person, but nobody wants to do that kind of lift because it requires industry collaboration which we are so wildly opposed to. But the payoffs can be huge. ApplePay required such a lift to succeed. New protocols needed to be designed - everyone from retail banks to the payment processors needed to be on board. The party that never got on board were merchants, so we just forced it on them. In the end, the US went from one of the least insecure credit card payment systems to one of the most secure. But Apple had to spend years pulling everyone there before launch. But US industry isn't interested in doing that. Investors want them to decentralize, spin off lower margin parts of their business, making the task of that kind of end-to-end coordination ever harder. We should be doing the opposite.

Anyway, it'll make for a lot of technical advancements even though these companies will keep bankrupting themselves because this isn't a technical problem but a social/management one.

 

[johnsonwax]

That sounds great and all, but real humans, billions of them, have their entire short lives built around the current system. Some VC firm shouting "surprise!" and removing jobs one by one until we decades later are at a point where it finally applies to everyone is a recipe for mass unemployment.

I was in the graphic desig industry before. The digital version. When print died and the market was flooded with job seekers nobody gave a shit. We just got slowly mass unemployed over a period of two years. There was no magic solution.

The same boiling frog effect will happen here. Over several decades of cascading economic turmoil. We're going to have our lives ruined so some dipshit 100 years in the future can lounge around. I vote no to sacrificing my short life for them. There has to be another way to transition to this than relying on the mercy of profit seeking companies (they have no mercy)

None of this is new. It's as old as humanity itself. You don't think domestication of animals put people out of work? It freed people up to do more productive work. Same will happen here.

The problem isn't the productivity gain, but who benefits from it. When someone figured out how to get an ox to pull a plow, they benefited from the transfer of work. I'm old enough that history books when I was a kid talked about how the cotton gin was such a great invention because it made the lives of slaves better. Bitch, they were still fucking slaves. That invention may have had a marginal impact on the lives of slaves, but it was the plantation owner that took all the real benefits.

Productivity gains are a necessary and beneficial thing, provided you don't permit capital owners to take all the benefits - which is what you're describing. When you rail against the productivity gain, you're doing the bidding of the capital holders when you should instead be demanding that those benefits flow predominantly to you, and not them. When containerization showed up in ports, the western US port worker union held out for exactly that. Containerization was so beneficial to the port operators that they bought out all of the port workers - just retired them regardless of how old they were.

The solution for coal miners is for solar and wind power operators to just buy them out in whole. The savings are there and then some. Demand that affected workers be bought out for all of this. You can start that by supporting local unions to do this, and then pushing for legislators to put this in the law. Maybe the idea of reparations will get broader support if some of that comes to workers across the board.

 

[mobby_6kl]

The thing is, all these “solutions” are really just stopgaps to addressing the real problem. The problem being, people want more out of life than just education, work, and kids.

How about a mandatory 4-day work week? 6 weeks vacation? An actual, guaranteed livable wage? And most importantly, a society that’s willing to step in and help people take care of their children so that making the choice to foster the next generation doesn’t mean placing your entire life on hold for years?

These hardly seem like outlandish asks that would bring the modern economy to its knees. The problem is, as a society, we’re still stuck in a mindset where economic growth is the metric by which we insist on measuring success.

I would wager that if we figured out how to take all of our technological progress and turn it to benefit people rather than the increasingly concentrated capital that we allow to have undue influence over all aspects of society, focusing on human wellbeing as the most important metric by which to judge our success, the problem of population stagnation would largely solve itself. Because, as you say, people want kids. We just insist on making the cost so high that many people choose to forgo that fundamental part of the human experience entirely.

Most of Western Europe has that or close enough (other than 4-day weeks for now, though Fridays often are half-assed days already), as well as long paid parental leave, daycare support etc etc. Still doesn't really for reaching even replacement rates.

Also I don't think "people want to have children" is a completely safe assumption.

I mean I don't disagree that we should improve quality of life for everyone but I wouldn't be surprised that people will just end up spending that extra time and money on whatever it is they spend it now instead of having children.

Unless... we can have humanoid robot nannies that will change the diapers and feed the children and keep watch at night while we're off doing something else! Anecdotally at least that's one of the reasons. I can afford children but it'd mean a significant downgrade to QoL in other areas.

 

[csw]

Que Musk suing Figure over something he makes up, because Tesla's "Optimus" butler bot isn't hardcore enough. Turns out it needed more than 42 hardcores. For humanity/civilization.

cue | kyo͞o | noun a thing said or done that serves as a signal to an actor or other performer to enter or to begin their speech or performance.

queue | kyo͞o | noun1 mainly British English a line or sequence of people or vehicles awaiting their turn to be attended to or to proceed.

 

[RZetopan]

Is this thing tethered or battery powered? In the first and fourth images of the first set there appears to be a cable or wire.

View attachment 75406View attachment 75405

OMG, that's an umbilical cord! THEY ARE REPRODUCING!!!

 

[Dr Spiff]

Very cool - wonder where we’ll be in 10-20 years. Maybe I can have one helping out at home when I’m retired.

Some Ars articles show both imperial and metric units.. I like those articles. I wonder if a tech forward outfit like Ars could have a user setting, allowing readers to select their preferred units? That would be great.

 

[chronoss2022]

SEElatest article about ai and malware
all this needs is to be able to self replicate and thats no longer a movie

 

[chronoss2022]

NOW imagine masive numbers of htese in old folks homes
this might be the end market for real as we all age to retirement

 

[BBennett]

So is there a purpose to the shape I'm missing?

Sexbots. The true eventual goal that no one talks about.

Porn is always at the leading edge of technology...always.

 

[vedekhaliwell]

Why am I seeing a Cylon future or a Detroit: Become Human Android one? In the latter we will see 40% unemployment and android achieving sentience then rise up against us.

 

[Pierre Ordinaire2]

I guess the restrooms will become charging stations, from the present "discharging" stations!

 

[Pierre Ordinaire2]

Most of Western Europe has that or close enough (other than 4-day weeks for now, though Fridays often are half-assed days already), as well as long paid parental leave, daycare support etc etc. Still doesn't really for reaching even replacement rates.

View attachment 75443

Also I don't think "people want to have children" is a completely safe assumption.
View attachment 75444

I mean I don't disagree that we should improve quality of life for everyone but I wouldn't be surprised that people will just end up spending that extra time and money on whatever it is they spend it now instead of having children.

Unless... we can have humanoid robot nannies that will change the diapers and feed the children and keep watch at night while we're off doing something else! Anecdotally at least that's one of the reasons. I can afford children but it'd mean a significant downgrade to QoL in other areas.

How strange that Corsica has over 1.7 while Sardinia has less than 1.3. Also that Catholic Ireland has over 1.7 while Catholic Spain and Italy have less than 1.3.

 

[neffo]

Since we're firmly in the AI era, I have to ask: is that demo video REAL, or is it AI generated? Or perhaps it's traditional CGI? It certainly has a different "feel" that what you see from Boston Dynamics.

More than ever, we need to be asking those sorts of questions.

Look, it's quite possible the robot was rolling down a hill.

 

[fancysunrise]

cue | kyo͞o | noun a thing said or done that serves as a signal to an actor or other performer to enter or to begin their speech or performance.

queue | kyo͞o | noun1 mainly British English a line or sequence of people or vehicles awaiting their turn to be attended to or to proceed.

Yes, thank you

 

[the-unknown]

This thing looks like a tin piece of crap right now but in less than a decade it will be replacing all those black Tesla plant workers Elon Musk seems to hate so much. I think, if anything we should start laying the groundwork for a Universal Basic Income, because the writing is kind of on the wall at this point for factory jobs.

I think automation is also going to take a chunk out of white collar work as well.

 

[Yangguang]

It has nipples! Why!? These people really need to get designers involved!

 

[Paranoid Android]

I find it quite strange for a technology website to have the majority of comments coming across as dismissive or overtly hostile to technology and what the future could hold for it.

Personally I see it as a good thing that capital is being put to work in uses like this rather than another social media company, app or another way to jam adverts in front of my eyes.

The same negativity seems to be true of the technology subreddit.

Fusion, high speed satellite internet, aligned AGI, self-driving cars, regime change in cost to access space - I hope we can look back at this time as having achieved some if not all of these.

I'm late responding to this, but this comment and the sentiment expressed struck me as something I might've written in the recent past, especially the part about preferring this to social media apps and ad tech.

In the past couple of years, there's been a profound sense of disillusionment around big tech industry. Ten years ago this sort of thing might've evoked a little bit of genuine unease, but also lots of genuine excitement and intrigue.

But the public perception of Silicon Valley disruptors and visionary boy-genius tech CEOs has soured. I think there's several factors contributing to this malaise.

There's the growing realization how much previously beloved services and platforms like Google, Amazon, etc. have decayed (the concept of "enshittification").

There's the recent booms and busts of sleazy "Web3" junk like NFTs, Crypto, Metaverses, and the like. Much of what's coming out of the tech world feels less like an exciting new frontier of progress that will make our lives more convenient but rather a threat of a more aggressively corporatized, monetized, and advertised hellscape. There's a sense that these promises of technological revolution are either outright scams, or in the case of AI, something that will usher in dystopia if it actually does work.

I also believe that the downfall of Elon Musk's public image has had a huge impact on how even tech enthusiasts look at things like this. He was once a sort of patron saint of techno-optimist nerds; a quirky but brilliant guy who accomplishes big and exciting things to make our sci-fi visions a reality. His degeneration into what he is now has tainted that kind of thinking by extension, fairly or not.

People with Musk-like ideas in tech often come across more like deluded weirdoes at best, or reactionary creeps at worst. Combined with his growing list of failed promises with regards to things like self-driving vehicles and robots, you get a response like what you see here when someone else presents something that looks like Tesla's Optimus.

 

[PhaseB]

I find it quite strange for a technology website to have the majority of comments coming across as dismissive or overtly hostile to technology and what the future could hold for it.

Personally I see it as a good thing that capital is being put to work in uses like this rather than another social media company, app or another way to jam adverts in front of my eyes.

The same negativity seems to be true of the technology subreddit.

Fusion, high speed satellite internet, aligned AGI, self-driving cars, regime change in cost to access space - I hope we can look back at this time as having achieved some if not all of these.

Technology can be a wonderful tool to make the lives of humans better, if both the technology and the political landscape are geared towards that. With more and more technology getting closer and closer to replacing more and more people, together with the divide between the rich and poor becoming bigger and bigger in addition to social systems having been hollowed out, the political side to this change seems ill equipped to handle the coming changes.

While humans have throughout the past always found other new jobs... that is not a universal guarantee with technology progress if that progress can and does replace humans directly. When the change from the horse drawn carriage to the automobile happened, equivalent new jobs for the horses never happened.

And if politics does not effectively work to handle these changes, a lot of pain will ensue (in addition to all the pain that increased inequality is already causing). People here are smart enough to understand that a painless, positive transition where all or even most benefit is not a given and possibly not even likely with the patterns of behavior and social developments we are seeing currently.

 

[PhaseB]

Maybe new companies have always worked this way, but it seems like all the really promising huge growth companies never take public IPO investments.

So you have the ultra rich buying in before anyone else can even attempt to purchase shares through an IPO.

Thus locking out anyone from ever getting a chance to invest.

There are rules a company must fulfil to be allowed to IPO, this is a VERY good thing. Just look at all the SPACs that are failing left and right, they went with the SPAC route because they couldn't fulfil those rules and tried to get around them. Not fulfilling even those basic levels of having a working business instead of just investor money, they never got to the stage of a working business and all the people buying their stocks on the stock market (that should have never been allowed to invest in them) are now paying the price. SPACS should have never been allowed (but financial regulation is a joke these days, stock buybacks were also not something allowed before the early 80s).

Since they don't have a working business yet, they can do tech demonstrations and personal meetings to convince people to invest. That is not possible on a large scale. And if you would put your money into them without even that you're not investing anymore you're gambling and fad chasing. As long as you only do that with money you can afford to lose that is fine (and if you make enough money that that is likely, you can become a "sophisticated investor" and have more options open to you), but the average joe would be taken advantage of massively more than they already are. These regulations didn't come out of nowhere and exist for very good reasons.

 

[singebob]

View attachment 75402
(image source)

Hipster killer robots.
Are we calling them now?
How long would you say? 20 years?

 

[Thank You and Best of Luck!]

IMO, the real answer is that the VCs putting up the money are middle-aged nerds who want the robots from the SF they read as kids. And I've got no problem with that. I just think it makes asking "why" fairly pointless unless & until the VC money runs dry and the robots have to show a plausible change of turning a profit. Then there will be a shake-out.

The problem of course is that this necessarily means that capital isn't being allocated to one or more robotics companies that are working on robots that would be more useful.

This is a very real and very annoying aspect of the way VC works. There's a huge opportunity cost to the completely ridiculous ways in which they pick winners and losers.

 

[Connstruct]

This reminds me of Isaac from The Orville.

 

[tkboxer]

If your going to use them in the fast food industry, you had better give them a defense system.
It's getting ugly in there for humans.

 

[Acidtech]

I'm very skeptical that this technology is anywhere near a everyday useful state. We've been talking about full self driving for 10 years and it still feels another 10 years away. The technology very doable to get 85% of what's needed but the devil is the last 15%.

You think 10 years is a long time. If we are lucky the major changes coming will take 10 years. If we are not lucky it may be months instead. At least unlucky for the majority of people since there is no chance UBI will go anywhere any time soon.

 

[Acidtech]

They walk like a 90 year old man.

Yep. Robots will always be as slow as a 90 year old man because technology never improves or advances. /s

Can you be a bigger moron? I suspect not.

 

[Acidtech]

The same place all money comes from.

Just to clarify for "people". Money is an artifical construct. It is made up. A group delusion we all agree to.

P.S. Not saying I have an alternative.

 

[Stickmansam]

How strange that Corsica has over 1.7 while Sardinia has less than 1.3. Also that Catholic Ireland has over 1.7 while Catholic Spain and Italy have less than 1.3.

I don't think the islands are subdivided from their country. So Corsica gets the same average as France while Sardinia is Italy's average.

I see religiousity as all things being equal type of scenario. Ireland has the benefit of their tax evasion, while Spain and Italy have been stuck in economic malaise (with brief respites) for over a decade.