Figure AI

Contribution to AI

Humanoid robots had spent decades as demonstration objects, judged on how gracefully they walked across a stage rather than on whether anything got made. The shift here was towards a payroll-shaped test: a machine on a shift, at a customer's plant, with output somebody counts. The commercial agreement signed with BMW Manufacturing in January 2024 put robots into automotive production at Spartanburg, South Carolina , and the pilot that followed had Figure 02 working ten-hour shifts across ten months, spanning the production of more than 30,000 X3s — small as automation goes, but assessed against a factory's schedule instead of a highlight reel. Helix, released in February 2025, is the technical argument: a seven-billion-parameter vision-language model handling scene and instruction at seven to nine hertz, paired with an eighty-million-parameter visuomotor policy emitting continuous actions at two hundred hertz, the two trained end to end and both running on the robot's own embedded GPUs. Around five hundred hours of teleoperated demonstration went into it , which relocated the bottleneck from mechanism to data. Everything after follows from that reading. A wholly owned factory designed for twelve thousand units a year makes sense once a deployed fleet is also a collection instrument, and the choice to build the models in-house rather than license them asserted that body and policy cannot sensibly be developed by separate companies.

Drafted with AI and edited by hand (claude-opus-5, reviewed 2026-08).