FIGURE AI LAUNCHES INDEX, TRAINING ITS ROBOTS ON 16 MILLION CROWDSOURCED UPLOADS

Summary from the TLDR Hardware newsletter

Figure AI has come out of stealth with Index, a crowdsourced data platform that's already collected 16 million video uploads from over 264,000 app downloads across 108 countries, paying contributors $15 million so far to film themselves doing everyday tasks like opening drawers or folding laundry. The bet addresses robotics' core data bottleneck: language models could train on internet text, but embodied AI needs real-world physical demonstrations that simply don't exist online at scale. Figure is committing over $1 billion to data and compute over the next 12 months to close that gap.