I always thought humanoid robots look like us because the world is built for humans (doors, stairs, kitchen counters etc) but figure's new release shows another reason, and i think it's the bigger one: > until now, teaching a robot a chore meant collecting data on that exact robot in that exact room, which is slow and expensive and only ever taught it that one thing > figure built an app where people get paid to film themselves doing everyday stuff from their own POV, and about 90,000 people a week are uploading to it now > the robot learned how humans move and handle things from those videos, and then got a bit of extra training on three specific jobs > then they put it in 30 homes it had never seen, with towels, beds and toys it had never seen either, and no training happened in any of those houses > it made the beds, folded the towels and tidied the toys into a basket > the same robot without the human videos finished the job 9% of the time, and with them it finished 56% of the time > and the more human video they feed it, the better it gets at guessing the next move, in a curve you can predict (that's key, it scales!) this only works because the robot has our body. a robot on wheels with a claw can watch you make a bed all day and copy nothing, because it doesn't have the hands or the reach so the human shape also solves the problem robots always had, which is that nobody ever filmed enough robots doing chores. there are 8 billion of us doing them every day though, and now filming us is the training it still fails almost half the time, so nobody is getting a housekeeper this year. but going from 9 to 56 in one step is a big jump the flywheel is flywheeling