Meet The New AI Robot Billionaire

hey figure one what do you see right now I see a red apple on a plate in the center of the table a drying rack with cups and a plate and you standing nearby with your hand on the table humanoid robots are having a moment a decade or two ago it was a struggle to get robots to walk not to mention respond to spoken requests now armed with advancements in artificial intelligence a gaggle of companies are at work on these bipedal Creations serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock founded robot maker figure less than 2 years ago and has lured some of the biggest names in Tech and AI as investors Adcock is Riding High on the progress at his 23-month-old robot startup has made so far working out of converted Warehouse offices in Sunny Bale California he took an indirect path to his current ultra competitive Pursuit he grew up on a soybean Farm in MOA Illinois run by his parents par before graduating from University of Florida with a business degree in 2008 after he graduated from University he worked on Wall Street and then founded two other startups by August 2022 Adcock had eight employees now it's up to 80 and growing with employees joining from some of the top tech companies there are no commercially viable humanoid companies today that are in Market making money so I would say you know at the surface level we we have we have to introduce a product into Market that's never been done before it's just a huge technical fee it's a huge integration burden um there's a safety burden there a cost area Focus it's just extremely difficult thing to challenging business to to be building uh along the way we've had to go build a team from scratch uh I probably spent the first year in a really cramped phone booth calling everybody in the world trying to convince them to come over here uh it's always hard trying to hire great people I feel very confident and fortunate that we have like some of the best engineers in the world here today it was very obvious even when I first met him he moves fast he is an organizer and is able to sort of collect incredible people and organize those teams and he's highly commercial and so he sees what needs to be done to truly bring these Technologies to Market in the past robots have taken years to design and build but figure is all about speed at Figure We Believe getting to Market faster is super healthy from an engineering perspective we have like an basically an iterative design approach uh to engineering which means we spend like less time on like research and development and analyzing things we spend more time on just building and testing products very quickly became obvious to us that this was like backing forward in 1903 where it's very rare to have a new technology that has no incumbents and is unregulated and the and the reality is is if this technology Works everything changes artificial intelligence will be the backbone to basically everything we do that will help control the robot help observe the physical world plan actions uh do prediction in March 2024 figure publicly released a video demonstrating its figure one robot based on the scene right now where do you think the dishes in front of you go next the dishes on the table like that plate and cup are to go into the drying rack next great can you put them there of [Music] course a high level the robot has so many different ways it can move yeah right sitting there and writing code for every single thing it needs to do like make coffee or do work in manufacturing take forever forever it's impossible to do so we need a better way of doing that we think that way is through uh AI training so we have a whole AI team that works on how we train the robot to do useful work all day long uh in these in these instruction environments figure has a 3D printer on site and it makes things like printed circuit boards and improvements to the motors called actuators here we are designing uh new generations of of electric motors uh these motors are used uh all throughout the robot to make it move around uh there's there's electric motor in here very similar to what you'd have an electric car and we have extra sensors and other things in here that you might not see uh that we also design here in house naturally I think a lot of people are still hesitant about the evolution of robots especially humanoids the interesting thing here is our robot looks like a human so we can GA gather humanlike data for humans doing demonstrations of things and if we can trade our robot to do it that's like the holy grail for us robots interacting with humans is like a fundamental to our business like if we can't have robots interacting with humans every single day there it's it's going to be very limiting for a humanoid we really need uh them be able to talk to the robots as probably probably the main default user interface we need to be able to interact next to them safely we need to have the robots also safely integrated into a home so we don't want them falling over damaging things hurting people so safety is like core to our mission of being able to work next to humans every single day and of course there's a that robots will take jobs away from humans it's very easy to run into concerns around a dystopian future of what a humanoid will be but again after our work it just became obvious of how large the need is for these with the labor Gap that's happening not just in the US but globally where there's a few million jobs that humans don't want where they're not showing up to dayto day and it's very low hanging fruit to have a couple million of these robots out there doing jobs that we don't want to do if you walk into like a manufacturing or Warehouse plan today they're losing 50 to 150% turnover every single year people just don't want to do these jobs where they walk 10 miles a day or they grab 50 items an hour or it's their next to things that are you know getting spot welded and it's some very unsafe and we have 10 million jobs that are open in the US and nobody wants and we also having a collapse in the amount of workers in the workforce so there's this huge labor crisis that's going on that's really not well reported and we want to go and help solve that so I think it's going to be quite a long time before we're ever really taking people's jobs in a significant way I think what we're really seeing is a labor crisis that we can go in help uh help basically help with that [Music] void robot workers May soon become a reality companies like BMW are exploring the possibility of putting figures robots into their Factory line we've chosen to work with groups like BMW that are aligned with us on getting robotss into Market quicker and then scaling out as fast as we can we hope to launch over the next 12 to 24 months in Spartanburg South Carolina which is their largest uh plant globally in terms of production volume a lot of the work we're doing with them is revolved around work in the body shop with manufacturing moving sheet metal working their warehouse Logistics moving bins and boxes and other type of tasks there's thousands of those type of uh tasks that need to be automated at those facilities we hope over the next 12 to 24 months we're starting to have real robots in Real facilities at our clients this is one of these areas where like a lot of the folks here myself we've been dreaming about this for a long time since I was a kid having a chance to come in here every day and work on a humanoid robot and actually integrate into the real world is we're just super fortunate to be here and we're working as hard as possible a lot has to happen before humanoid robots are an everyday thing at even factories around the country one of them is figuring out the power issue figures lithiumion batteries are last just two hours right now and right now their version of the robot still has a black cord dragging behind it that connects to a computer the next version of its robot will carry its own computer and be cordless I'm told can robots learn everything they need to do that may take some time I think once we start seeing robots in the real world doing everyday tasks helping humans doing real work every single day it'll feel like 30 years of the future 50 years of the future is pulled forward it it'll be pretty [Music] magical

Channel: Forbes

Views: 176,251

Keywords: Forbes, Forbes Media, Forbes Magazine, Forbes Digital, Business, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Investing, Personal Finance, ai, billionaire, figure, figure 1, brett adcock, humanoid, robot

Id: XRmqtDW3noQ

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2024