Backed by tech giants, is the founder of Figure AI the "Musk 2.0"?

Due to the competing investments from major tech companies such as Amazon and NVIDIA, the American humanoid robot startup Figure AI has recently gained great popularity. According to the Associated Press on March 1st, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup OpenAI will also collaborate with the company. Backed by the tech industry, Figure AI's founder and CEO Brett Adcock has become a media darling. Over the past 20 years, Adcock has founded multiple tech companies of different types, earning him the nickname "Elon Musk 2.0" in the industry.

Born in 1986, Adcock grew up on a farm outside the small town of Movaca in Illinois. Media reports indicate that Adcock showed a certain business acumen at an early age. In an interview, he recalled, "I started my entrepreneurial journey in high school and college, mainly focusing on tech-related content."

After graduating from the University of Florida, Adcock founded two major content platforms, StreetofWalls.com and Working App, embarking on the path of tech entrepreneurship. At the age of 26, Adcock founded the AI-based recruitment company Vettery. In an interview, he mentioned that initially no one was willing to invest in Vettery, so for three consecutive years, he invested his own savings. It wasn't until 2017 that Vettery excelled in the job market and eventually raised $12 million from multiple venture capital firms.

"From painful debt to gaining the first capital trust, it was significant." Adcock expressed his mixed feelings at the time. However, he did not linger in the content creation field for long but shifted his focus to the transportation sector. In 2018, Adcock founded Archer Aviation, producing fully electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft for urban air mobility. With 15 years of experience in software services, Adcock was well aware that the possibility of learning the entire process from designing to manufacturing an aircraft in the short term was close to zero. So the first thing he did was create a spreadsheet and call everyone he could think of.

Peter Diamandis, a friend of Musk and co-founder of the fintech company Bold Ventures, commented, "Adcock's determination in building Archer Aviation is reminiscent of Musk's early days creating SpaceX, searching for textbooks, reading extensively, interviewing experts, and then starting to build the company." Ultimately, Adcock turned Archer Aviation into a leading global electric aviation company and led it to go public on the NYSE.

In May 2022, Adcock announced his resignation from the board of Archer Aviation and founded Figure AI. On the company's website, he wrote, "Figure AI, envisioning the next 30 years." According to Reuters, Adcock will differentiate Figure AI from companies like Boston Dynamics and Amazon Robotics, focusing on developing robots capable of handling various tasks. The ultimate goal is for Figure AI's robots to learn and interact with the environment. Adcock believes that within 5 years, robots will be deployed in commercial applications of some of the world's largest brands, creating a potential industry worth billions of dollars. Currently, Figure AI has developed 5 humanoid robot prototypes with the goal of applying them in the warehousing and manufacturing sectors facing labor shortages.

Adcock spends millions of dollars each month, or even more, to build teams and purchase hardware. The bad news is that by September 2023, the company's cash flow is almost depleted. The good news is that the company's product, Figure 01, learned how to make coffee by watching human demonstration videos and recently secured large investments from companies like NVIDIA and Amazon.

Currently, many countries are actively deploying humanoid robots. China ranks humanoid robots as one of the top ten iconic products in future industries. Cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen have issued policy documents emphasizing humanoid robots as an important direction for industrial development. Many domestic humanoid robot startups are also studying the development experiences of foreign companies.

Jiang Lei, Chief Scientist of Humanoid Robots (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., told the Global Times that Figure AI is very prominent in the field of humanoid robots. On one hand, its founding team comes from platforms like IHMC (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition), Boston Dynamics, and Stanford University, which have made significant contributions to the field of humanoid robots. Therefore, the company is more like a formal "national team." On the other hand, unlike Boston Dynamics and others pursuing high-end, laboratory robots, Figure AI chose the path of general humanoid robots and embodied intelligent technology from the beginning, aiming to serve people's daily lives with low cost and strong implementation capabilities.

Jiang Lei stated that the Figure 01 robot can master the skill of making coffee just by watching videos of humans doing it. This "autonomous learning" mode of the robot is more efficient than Tesla's method of transferring data to robots. The progress speed of Figure 01 humanoid robot will not be slower than Tesla's "Optimus Prime," and the goal set by Figure AI's founder to achieve commercialization within 5 years seems to be feasible.

Authors: Chen Zishuai, Ren Zhong, Source: Global Times, Original Title: "Backed by Tech Giants, is the Founder of Figure AI the 'Musk 2.0'?"