Name: Is the Figure 03 Robot Ready to Clean Your House?
Uploaded: 2025-10-14T08:05:43.000Z
Duration: 6 min 5 s
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So Figure designs and manufactures humanoid robots.

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And the goal is to be able to do as much stuff a human can as possible in the physical world.

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We think of a lot of ourselves as like trying to give.

This is kind of a creepy, but like trying to give AI a body.

How do we ultimately send robots out to the world to do everything from work in the commercial market and then ultimately we want to put a robot in every home in the world.

Laundry, dishes, cleaning up the house, basically everything that a human can do in the physical world over time, we'd like a humanoid to do.

In late September, Time's cover shoot was a domestic affair with a humanoid robot called the figure 3.

It's the latest creation of figure AI, a California based startup backed by more than a billion dollars in funding which is building towards a future where humanoid robots make human labor a thing of the past.

Time witnessed the Figure three load a dishwasher, clear clutter and fold clothes.

But even in this tightly controlled environment, the robot often struggled.

The dream of general robotics, it seems, is still a long way from becoming a reality.

So there were occasions where I was watching the robot folding towels and loading a washer and it's kind of clear that it can kind of do those things pretty well.

But there were times when one of the towels dropped out of the washer and it was unable to pick it up.

So, like, how do you get from there to your vision of general robotic overlord that can do anything you want it to?

I think the short answer is we feel like data fixes almost all this at this point.

And we've seen that in almost all the demonstrations we do, where even in the early stages, like we say tile folding or like the logistics use case, like, it just wasn't that great.

As we add more data, it got faster, it made less mistakes.

And all that is sort of asytomically basically approaching zero.

It's getting close to human levels in terms of we could run them for hours and hours and it just performs really well.

Large language models like ChatGPT proved that if you scale up the amount of data and computing power used to train a neural network, it would gain surprising new capabilities across the board.

Figure is one of a group of companies attempting to apply that insight to robotics.

The company's spending big to collect video data of humans performing tasks like folding clothes and cleaning homes in a bid to teach robots to do the same thing.

The company says early Experiments have already yielded promising results.

Some of the last generation of robot, the figure 2, are already working in a BMW factory in South Carolina, moving parts that ultimately make it into the BMW X3.

One of our core focuses in the roadmap here is how do we ship robots basically into every consumer home in the world.

We want to do what we do all day in the home and just, like, things I hate, like, I don't want to do laundry, I don't want to do dishes, I don't want to clean up the house.

And we haven't really had any, like, large breakthroughs in the home in terms of automation for decades.

So our view is that the robot will not only act as, like, your companion in your home, being able to share, like, very deep memory and be able to, like, basically talk to you basically just with speech, and

then ultimately be able to do everything you do in the home that you don't want to do.

But upon its launch this October, the figure 3 won't be ready for your home.

Not only is the robot not yet useful enough to be an Android butler, but

Figure says it also has many unsolved safety challenges.

Large language models are notorious for sometimes going off the rails.

And that controllability problem will extend to the systems that power humanoid robots, too.

There's also the problem of ensuring that the robot doesn't fall over, cause property damage, or injure its human cohabitants.

Getting the robot to be extremely safe in the home long term is a really hard problem.

I would say now we're tracking like, almost like 15 different areas for safety.

There's like a physical safety thing of, like, the system safety engineering needs to be done really well.

There's like, cybersecurity that we need to do really well.

We have a safety lead here that previously worked on basically mobile robotics.

We have a cybersecurity lead that came from, like, one of the top groups in cybersecurity here in the US they each have teams.

And we're basically trying to spend basically a large focus on trying to figure out how do we enter first, which will be U.S.

homes, and then global in a safe way and do high performance work.

If there's even a small chance that this audacious company can succeed in its goal, the implications would be world changing.

With the global population expected to peak this century before heading into decline, the arrival of robots might allow the world economy to continue growing even as human labor becomes less abundant.

Thanks to robots, the cost of goods and services might plummet, potentially enabling an increased quality of life for all.

But liberating humans from work would also mean liberating them from their paychecks.

Robots would do the same for manual labor as cloud based AI threatens to do for office work, creating a joblessness crisis that Adcock says should be addressed with some form of universal basic income.

At the same time, though, this billionaire entrepreneur is already calculating how to win control of what he expects to be a $40 trillion industry and one that tends towards Monopoly.

You're making like a synthetic human that's like really cheap.

It works like seven days a week, like 20 to 24 hours a day, and

like just wants to keep working and learning.

How many cheap humans, synthetic humans, could you sell in the world to do stuff?

I mean, I think billions in the workforce for sure.

So you have like close to 10 billion there.

I do feel there'll be a point probably in the Bay Area first where you walk out and you see more humanoids than humans.

I look at this like, you know, I grew up reading a bunch of crazy sci fi and dreaming of this, but

I think it'll be amazing to have like humanoids out and about.

It can basically do things for you as a companion, knows you better than probably maybe anybody else.

So I'm like really looking forward to it.

We're not designing the robots to like harm humans or weaponize things like this.

We're designing them to do really useful work for humanity.