Sucidal Humanoid Robots

 

Hasta la Vista, Figure 02 Figure AI had a problem to solve. It couldn’t decide how to decommission its previous generation of Figure 02 robots. So, it asked the crowd… It was a scene right out of Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Except it wasn’t science fiction. Figure AI, one of the leading intelligent humanoid robotics companies, had a problem to solve. It couldn’t decide how to decommission its previous generation of Figure 02 robots. So, it asked the crowd. Of all people, Arnold Schwarzenegger replied on X, suggesting that Figure AI melt them. And that’s exactly what Figure AI did. They shipped them off in boxes to Finland, where a team and a 75-ton arc furnace were prepared to enable their demise. There’s no way to describe it. You’ll have to see it for yourself… Into the Fiery Pit I’ve included some short clips below. The first is of a Figure 02 stepping onto a hook, grasping the chain, and being lowered into the vat knowing of its imminent demise… Source: Figure AI Figure AI went so far as to fly out Schwarzenegger to film him on site actually lowering Figure 02 into the molten steel. He even gave the robot a sendoff with an expected “Hasta La Vista, Figure 02.” But the visuals became more difficult to watch after that. The next self-immolation was a Figure 02 standing on a precipice, peering over the edge into what was bubbling below. He then turns to leap back into the vat of molten steel. Source: Figure AI Then even more disconcerting was the robot that got a running start off the platform before flipping into the inferno below. Source: Figure AI And then perhaps the most difficult to stomach, a Figure 02 backing up to the edge, leaning back, and ending it all in a fiery explosion upon impact. Source: Figure AI I don’t know about you, but I found watching this quite uncomfortable. These humanoids have humanlike movements now and are intelligent. It feels too close for comfort.

An Elaborate Marketing Stunt? While we know that they are not sentient (yet), and they were in fact programmed to send themselves off to a fiery death, it still represents some form of end of life. In product management, this is referred to as EOL. And for tech companies that make hardware, there is always a question of what to do with the prototypes when they are no longer useful. Store them in a warehouse? Put a few in a museum (eventually)? Throw them in the trash? In Figure AI’s case, they decided to melt them down… Terminator style. But to what end? Figure AI decided to take the remains of the Figure 02s and reconstitute them into “Small Artifacts” that are about one-third the scale of a Figure 02 head unit. Anyone can purchase them online for $500. The “Large Artifacts” for $1,900 sold out within hours. Source: Figure AI Was it all just a marketing stunt to generate clicks on social media? Or to raise some money selling the remains? Not at all. Tactical Decommissioning While it may look like that, Figure AI was actually making a pragmatic decision. The risk for Figure AI was for a bad actor to get ahold of a Figure 02 for industrial espionage. No one worries too much about EOL models, as everyone is racing ahead building the next generation, which right now is the Figure 03. It’s easy to forget about units that are hiding in a warehouse, which also means it is a lot easier for an agent to appropriate one – perhaps an agent of China – for the purpose of reverse engineering the hardware and software. Figure AI could have decommissioned the Figure 02 units by hand, tearing them down into individual parts and disposing of those critical parts that constitute Figure’s intellectual property. But that would have been very time-consuming, and also a distraction from the work the Figure team is already doing with Figure 03 – which is in production – and what comes next, Figure 04. The Figure CEO, Brett Adcock, has said that Figure 04 units will have hands that have human-level dexterity. He has indicated that the company has had a breakthrough and that humanlike hands are the key to achieving the utility and productivity gains that intelligent humanoid robots will bring. So, melting the Figure 02 population down to metal was the easiest way to destroy the intellectual property, avoid it falling into a competitor’s hands, and eliminate the labor cost associated with tearing them down. It’s not unlike Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The T-800 and T-1000 terminator models were eliminated in order to destroy the neural network and the semiconductors that powered it so that they couldn’t be used to build Skynet. And while we all know that Figure 02 wasn’t alive, at the pace of development that we are seeing right now, it won’t be long before we’re having discussions around consciousness and sentience, and whether or not we need to decommission robots that are not aligned or have gone rogue. That feeling when watching a Figure 02 leap to its own “death” is just a tinge of what we’ll be grappling with as the humanoids become more intelligent and more central to our lives. Jeff

How to trade in the choppy market

 

  

  

  

 

 

A weird choppy market

 

  

  

 

More selloffs ahead

 

  

  

Now the fun part....

I saw a post in my WeChat group, claiming the humanoid robotics firm, Figure AI, is the best in the sector. I disagree. I don't mean it is not a good one but in my mind, Tasla's Optimum is by far THE best in the sector!  Regardless, I have money in both companies and I will be glad either of them or better both can advance to make humanoid robotics as a household necessity. As a matter of fact, I even bet that our retirement life will be largely dependent on the functioning humanoid robotics in the foreseeable future. That's why I'm happy to see this writeup about the advances made by both companies. 

 Solving for Figure’s “Data Problem”

by J Brown 

 
Last month I was excited to see an announcement made by a leading humanoid robotics firm, Figure AI, for what it calls Index – its program to build “the world’s largest and most diverse physical dataset."


One of Tesla’s key competitive advantages in the autonomous driving industry has been its data repository of real-world video, which it used to train its full self-driving (FSD) software.

Both the repository and Tesla’s strategy for collecting that data have distinguished it from its competitors in the autonomous driving industry.

Rather than manufacturing two different product lines – electric vehicles (EVs) capable of self-driving and just plain-old EVs – Tesla designed and manufactured all of its EVs to be capable of self-driving.

Every Tesla EV came with a full self-driving computer and all of the cameras around the EV to capture a 360-degree view of its driving conditions.

Naturally, this increased the cost of manufacturing each EV. After all, many Tesla owners never signed up for the self-driving software, which costs extra. Those Tesla owners never needed the AI hardware or cameras, but the hardware was there anyway, and for good reason.

Having the AI hardware in every Tesla EV enabled Tesla to upsell many of its customers to self-driving software after the initial purchase or lease.

But the real value to Tesla was the ability to collect vast amounts of real-world data in natural driving conditions…

Building the Foundation
This all began shortly after Tesla installed its Autopilot hardware into Teslas in late 2014. Designed primarily for highways, Autopilot was a lower level of autonomous driving made available to Tesla customers in 2015. It was the software that preceded full self-driving software.

Prior to FSD, Tesla managed to collect about 9 billion miles of data of Teslas driving on Autopilot from millions of Teslas already on the road.

When a customer returned home, a Tesla EV would connect to a WiFi network and automatically upload that data to Tesla’s data repository. Those 9 billion miles of collected data became the foundation for the early training of Tesla’s vision-based full self-driving software.

The deployment of Tesla’s FSD software and more advanced versions of its AI hardware enabled even more valuable data collection of real-world traffic conditions on surface roads and in more urban environments. As Tesla’s “fleet” of EVs capable of autonomous driving grew, so did its data collection efforts.

It wasn’t long before Tesla’s autonomous miles driven using FSD exceeded that of Autopilot miles driven.

Tesla has now collected data on more than 14.59 billion autonomous miles on FSD, 5.67 billion of which have been collected in urban environments (i.e., cities).

By way of comparison, Google’s Waymo autonomous vehicles have only collected data on 220.6 million autonomous miles with its far less versatile non-vision-based autonomous software. It’s a small fraction of Tesla’s 14.59 billion autonomous miles, only about 1.5% of what Teslas have driven.

This is one of the key reasons that Tesla’s Cybercabs and Robotaxis are so incredible. The autonomous software that provides the intelligence of those ride-hailing services is the same software that exists in all production Teslas with FSD.

And this software also became the foundation for Tesla’s humanoid robot – Optimus.

The Index of Autonomy
There are more parallels between the two technologies than you might think. After all, a self-driving car is nothing more than a robot on four wheels.

Which raises the question, for those companies building intelligent general-purpose humanoid robots, how can they collect the training data needed to train humanoid robots without millions of prototype robots operating in the real world?

It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Electric vehicles are one thing. Even when they weren’t intelligent and capable of autonomous driving, they could – and did – collect useful data as a car that could be used for training a powerful AI.

But a humanoid robot without intelligence and knowledge of the real world would serve no purpose at all. It would be a fairly useless chunk of technology with little utility.

Tesla has an advantage already for its humanoid robot technology with FSD as a foundation and thousands of Optimus robots already working in Tesla offices and factories collecting data.

But what about the other robotics companies that don’t already have infrastructure and technology in place for data collection?

Last month I was excited to see an announcement made by a leading humanoid robotics firm, Figure AI, for what it calls Index – its program to build “the world’s largest and most diverse physical dataset.”

Index had been in stealth for about four months before the program was made public. It’s a very clever and smart way for Figure to solve the data problem.

Figure developed a downloadable smartphone app that enables what Figure calls Creators to sign up, receive a video recording device (a lightweight headset with a camera attached), record tasks being performed throughout the day, and then get paid for uploading video back to Figure.




As we can see above, Figure provides a task list of tasks that it desires to collect data from humans performing. For whatever tasks it is trying to improve the performance of, it simply pushes out a task list to all of its Creators.

Wearing the video recording device, Creators can earn income by simply going about normal chores throughout the day. Below is a short video clip of what Figure sees from the video data collected by Creators.


Index Data Collection by Creators | Source: Figure AI

As of August, Figure had already paid out $15 million to its Creators for their data collection efforts. And as of a few days ago, Figure’s CEO announced that the company had crossed 86,000 weekly active users uploading data to Figure.

It’s pretty impressive what Figure has done in only five months. It has already collected more than 22 million videos of real-world tasks performed by its global network of Creators. It was smart for Figure to create the financial incentive to accelerate that data collection.

Each point of light shown on the image below represents the location where a video has been collected to augment Figure’s dataset used for training its humanoid robot platform,


Creators Video Uploads | Source: Figure AI

Figure has stated that it is committed to spending $1 billion in the next 12 months on data collection and computational resources to train its Figure robots.

It’s a massive sum for a startup company that just formed a few years ago, in 2022. But it raised $1.5 billion in May 2025 in its Series C round, and it will almost certainly raise another large round within the next six months to continue to accelerate.

It would be very smart to do so. With this program, Figure is a contender in the race to build intelligent general-purpose humanoid robots.

They Will Walk Among Us
This is a massive, billion-plus unit market opportunity literally worth trillions of dollars. Elon Musk has said that eventually, about 80% of Tesla’s total value will be based just on its Optimus business.

No other technology can radically solve labor shortage problems in specific industries, as well as transform the labor markets, improving quality of life on a global scale.

Industry, logistics, distribution, health care, consumer, agriculture, security, manufacturing, education, and many other sectors will be transformed by intelligent general-purpose humanoid robots.

And the world will adopt these new intelligent “beings” as quickly as they can be manufactured.

They will walk among us…

A "fatal warning" smells foul!

 

 

  

 

For those who follow the AI development, they must be frightened these days for a fatal AI warning. While there is certainly some merit to be cautious about the fast uncontrolled development in AI, this particular warning smells foul. Let me share a write-up by an expert in the tech circle about this propaganda foul play.  

  

  

  

  

 

  

 

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More down days ahead!

  

    

 

 

 

 

Get ready for a VIX jump!