Figure
Figure (Figure AI) is an American AI robotics company that describes itself as “the first-of-its-kind AI robotics company bringing a general purpose humanoid to life.” It develops general-purpose humanoid robots and the embodied AI models that control them. The company was founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock and is headquartered in San Jose, California (per English Wikipedia).
Robots and models
Figure’s hardware has iterated through three generations: Figure 01 took its first steps in May 2023, Figure 02 improved hand dexterity and integrated a torso battery for workplace deployment, and Figure 03 was redesigned for home environments (all three per the official company page). On the software side, Helix is Figure’s model family for humanoid perception and whole-body control; Helix 2.5, announced on September 17, 2026, achieved zero-shot generalization across 30 unseen Bay Area homes on tidying living rooms, folding towels, and making beds, and the company says it has committed $3.5 billion of compute to training Helix through a partnership with Nscale (see the official announcement). See the Helix entry.
A manufacturing-deployment partnership with BMW was announced in January 2024; in February 2024 Figure raised $675 million from investors including OpenAI, Microsoft, and NVIDIA, and its model partnership with OpenAI ended roughly a year later (per English Wikipedia).
Discussion in the show
At the end of Next Token Weekly #003’s “实时语音与 Computer Use” (real-time voice and computer use) chapter, Guizang says “the robot company that used to work with OpenAI released a Helix 2.5,” which Orange confirms refers to Figure. In the following chapter, “具身智能与零样本任务” (embodied AI and zero-shot tasks), Guizang summarizes that Helix 2.5 “raised the zero-shot success rate on these tasks from 9% to 56%,” and remarks that “progress in embodied AI is still very slow, especially on the brain side”. The discussion matches the official announcement’s task scope, but the progress assessment is the host’s opinion. See the episode 003 chapter in the Chinese transcript.
Frequently asked questions
What company is Figure?
Figure is an AI robotics company founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Jose, California. It builds the Figure 01/02/03 humanoid robots and the Helix model family that controls them.
Where is Figure’s official website?
The official website is figure.ai; the company overview is on the company page and major announcements on the news page.
What is Helix, and how does it relate to Figure?
Helix is Figure’s in-house embodied-AI model family for humanoid perception and whole-body control; Helix 2.5 is the version announced on September 17, 2026. See the Helix entry and the official announcement.
What is Figure’s relationship with OpenAI?
Figure received investment from OpenAI in February 2024 and collaborated with it on speech models for robots; per English Wikipedia, that partnership ended about a year later as Figure moved to develop its own control models.