Figure's Index creator network processes 30 min of video per second; $15M paid to data creators
adcock_brett · x · 2026-09-08
Figure CEO Brett Adcock argues the humanoid race splits into chapters money can't buy (deep hardware engineering, the right AI recipe) and chapters it can — and Figure has entered the data-and-compute scaling chapter.
Index (data bet):
- Out of stealth: a creator network collecting real-world task video from homes and workplaces in 100+ countries via mobile apps
- 264,000 app downloads, 44,000+ weekly active users, 16M+ videos uploaded in 4 months
- Processing 30 minutes of video uploads per second — equivalent to 4.9 years of human work per day
- $15M paid out to creators so far; committed to spend $1B+ over the next 12 months
Nscale (compute bet): $3.5B of compute initially, intent past $6B, up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs
The thesis: generalization is a data problem — the physical data a general-purpose robot needs doesn't exist on the internet and must be captured from the real world. Figure's Helix AI stack improves with data like any learned system, and internal generalization results reportedly validate this. Adcock notes data alone can't solve it, hence the paired compute investment.
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