Meet The New AI Robot Billionaire

Forbes

Armed with more than $750 million in funding, Brett Adcock vows that Figure will become one of the most important businesses in the world. First, there is a lot of work to do. Adcock, the 38-year-old founder and CEO of robot maker Figure, is riding high. In January, the company announced a collaboration with BMW, with the goal of putting Figure’s robots to work at the German automaker’s Spartanburg, South Carolina manufacturing plant. Six weeks later, Figure raised $675 million at a $2.6 billion valuation from the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI Startup Fund and Jeff Bezos. At the same time, Figure signed a collaboration agreement with OpenAI to develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots.   The valuation makes Adcock, who owns about 50% of the Sunnyvale, California company, a new billionaire. With his Figure stake and shares from a previous startup, he’s worth an estimated $1.4 billion.  Even with all the money in the world, success is not assured.  0:00 Intro 0:35 Who is Brett Adcock? 1:45 Building the Figure Team  2:18 What Makes Figure Different? 3:16 Figure 01 Demonstration 4:44 Training Humanoids 6:47 The Future of Robots   Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2024/04/15/meet-the-new-ai-robot-billionaire/?sh=4eef9f7f7c32  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:02 >> Hey, figure one, what do you see right now?

00:04 [MUSIC]

00:08 >> I see a red apple on a plate in the center of the table,

00:11 a drying rack with cups and a plate, and

00:14 you standing nearby with your hand on the table.

00:18 >> Humanoid robots are having a moment.

00:20 A decade or two ago, it was a struggle to get robots to walk,

00:24 not to mention respond to spoken requests.

00:27 Now, armed with advancements in artificial intelligence,

00:30 a gaggle of companies are at work on these bipedal creations.

00:34 Serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock founded Robot Maker Figure less than two years

00:38 ago and has lured some of the biggest names in tech and AI as investors.

00:42 Adcock is riding high on the progress that his 23-month-old robot startup has

00:46 made so far, working out of converted warehouse offices in Sunnyvale,

00:51 California.

00:52 He took an indirect path to his current ultra-competitive pursuit.

00:56 He grew up on a soybean farm in Moico, Illinois, run by his parents before

01:00 graduating from University of Florida with a business degree in 2008.

01:04 After he graduated from university, he worked on Wall Street and

01:07 then founded two other startups.

01:10 By August 2022, Adcock had eight employees.

01:13 Now it's up to 80 and

01:15 growing, with employees joining from some of the top tech companies.

01:20 >> There are no commercially viable humanoid companies today that are in

01:24 the market making money.

01:26 So I would say at the surface level,

01:29 we have to introduce a product in the market that's never been done before.

01:33 It's just a huge technical fee, it's a huge integration burden,

01:37 it's a safety burden, it's a cost area of focus.

01:40 It's just an extremely difficult thing, a challenging business to be building.

01:45 Along the way, we've had to go build a team from scratch.

01:48 I probably spent the first year in a really cramped phone booth calling

01:51 everybody in the world trying to convince them to come over here.

01:54 It's always hard trying to hire great people.

01:57 I feel very confident and

01:58 fortunate that we have some of the best engineers in the world here today.

02:01 >> It was very obvious even when I first met him, he moves fast.

02:06 He is an organizer and is able to sort of collect incredible people and

02:09 organize those teams.

02:11 And he's highly commercial.

02:13 And so he sees what needs to be done to truly bring these technologies

02:17 to market.

02:18 [MUSIC]

02:21 >> In the past, robots have taken years to design and build, but

02:24 FIGURE is all about speed.

02:26 >> At FIGURE, we believe getting to market faster is super healthy.

02:30 From an engineering perspective,

02:31 we have basically an iterative design approach to engineering.

02:35 Which means we spend less time on research and development and

02:38 analyzing things.

02:39 We spend more time on just building and testing products.

02:43 >> Very quickly became obvious to us that this was like back and

02:47 forth between the two of us.

02:50 >> We're in a world of technology,

02:52 where it's very rare to have a new technology that has no incumbents and

02:56 is unregulated.

02:58 And the reality is, if this technology works, everything changes.

03:03 >> Artificial intelligence will be the backbone to basically everything we do

03:06 that will help control the robot, to help observe the physical world,

03:09 plan actions, do prediction.

03:12 >> In March 2024, FIGURE publicly released a video demonstrating its

03:17 technology.

03:17 >> Just on the scene right now,

03:19 where do you think the dishes in front of you go next?

03:21 [MUSIC]

03:27 >> The dishes on the table, like that plate and

03:30 cup, are likely to go into the drying rack next.

03:33 >> Great, can you put them there?

03:34 [MUSIC]

03:39 >> Of course.

03:40 [MUSIC]

03:50 >> At a high level, the robot has so many different ways it can move.

03:59 >> Right.

04:00 >> Sitting there writing code for

04:01 every single thing it needs to do, like make coffee or do work in manufacturing.

04:05 >> That would take forever, right?

04:06 >> Forever, so impossible to do.

04:08 So we need a better way of doing that.

04:09 We think that way is through AI training.

04:12 So we have a whole AI team that works on how we train the robot to do useful

04:15 work all day long in these structured environments.

04:19 >> FIGURE has a 3D printer on site, and it makes things like printed circuit boards

04:24 and improvements to the motors called actuators.

04:27 >> Here we are designing new generations of electric motors.

04:31 These motors are used all throughout the robot to make it move around.

04:35 There's an electric motor in here,

04:37 very similar to what you'd have in an electric car.

04:39 And then we have extra sensors and

04:41 other things in here that you might not see, that we also designed here in house.

04:45 >> Naturally, I think a lot of people are still hesitant about the evolution of

04:48 robots, especially humanoids.

04:50 >> The interesting thing here is our robot looks like a human.

04:52 So we can gather human-like data for humans doing demonstrations of things.

04:57 And if we can train our robot to do it, that's the holy grail for us.

04:59 >> Robots interacting with humans is fundamental to our business.

05:02 If we can't have robots interacting with humans every single day,

05:06 it's gonna be very limiting for a humanoid.

05:08 We really need to be able to talk to robots as probably the main default

05:13 user interface.

05:14 We need to be able to interact next to them safely.

05:17 We need to have the robots also safely integrated into a home, so

05:20 we don't want them falling over, damaging things, hurting people.

05:24 So safety is core to our mission of being able to work next to humans every

05:27 single day.

05:28 >> And of course, there's a fear that robots will take jobs away from humans.

05:32 It's very easy to run into concerns around a dystopian future of what

05:37 a humanoid will be.

05:38 But again, after our work,

05:40 it just became obvious of how large the need is for these.

05:44 With the labor gap that's happening, not just in the US, but globally,

05:47 where there's a few million jobs that humans don't want, or

05:51 they're not showing up to day to day.

05:53 And it's very low hanging fruit to have a couple million of these robots out there

05:56 doing jobs that we don't wanna do.

05:58 If you walk into a manufacturing or warehouse plant today,

06:03 they're losing 50 to 150% turnover every single year.

06:07 People just don't wanna do these jobs where they walk ten miles a day, or

06:09 they grab 50 items an hour, or

06:11 it's next to things that are getting spot welded and it's very unsafe.

06:16 And we have 10 million jobs that are open in the US and nobody wants.

06:20 And we also have a collapse in the amount of workers in the workforce.

06:23 So there's this huge labor crisis that's going on that's really not well reported.

06:27 And we wanna go and help solve that.

06:29 So I think it's gonna be quite a long time before we're ever really taking

06:33 people's jobs in a significant way.

06:34 I think what we're really seeing is a labor crisis that we can go in and

06:37 help basically help put that void.

06:40 [MUSIC]

06:47 >> Robot workers may soon become a reality.

06:50 Companies like BMW are exploring the possibility of putting figures robots

06:53 into their factory line.

06:55 We've chosen to work with groups like BMW that are aligned with us on getting

07:00 robots in the market quicker and then scaling out as fast as we can.

07:03 We hope to launch over the next 12 to 24 months in Spartanburg,

07:07 South Carolina, which is their largest plant globally in terms of production

07:11 volume.

07:12 A lot of the work we're doing with them is revolved around working the body shop

07:15 with manufacturing, moving sheet metal, working the warehouse logistics,

07:18 moving bins and boxes and other type of tasks.

07:21 There's thousands of those type of tasks that need to be automated,

07:24 those facilities.

07:25 We hope over the next 12 to 24 months,

07:27 we're starting to have real robots in real facilities at our clients.

07:31 This is one of these areas where a lot of the folks here, myself,

07:34 we've been dreaming about this for a long time since I was a kid.

07:36 Having a chance to come in here every day and work on a humanoid robot and

07:39 actually integrate into the real world is, we're just super fortunate to be here and

07:43 we're working as hard as possible.

07:45 >> A lot has to happen before humanoid robots are an everyday thing at

07:51 even factories around the country.

07:52 One of them is figuring out the power issue.

07:55 Figures lithium ion batteries are last just two hours right now.

07:58 And right now, their version of the robot still has a black cord dragging behind it

08:02 that connects to a computer.

08:04 The next version of this robot will carry its own computer and

08:06 be cordless, I'm told.

08:08 Can robots learn everything they need to do?

08:10 That may take some time.

08:12 >> I think once we start seeing robots in the real world, doing everyday tasks,

08:15 helping humans, doing real work every single day, it'll feel like 30 years of

08:20 the future, 50 years of the future is pulled forward.

08:22 It'll be pretty magical.

08:23 [MUSIC]

08:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Category

Transcript

Recommended