Figure paid people $15M to film chores, lifting robot zero-shot success in new homes from 9% to 56%
Scobleizer · x · 2026-10-31
Figure pays ordinary people via its crowdsourcing app Index to film themselves doing chores, feeding a massive robot-training data pipeline.
Key numbers:
- 264K downloads across 108 countries; 44,000 weekly uploaders;
- 16M+ videos, 30 minutes of footage per second — 4.9 years of human work per day;
- $15M paid out so far, with over $1B committed to data and compute over the next 12 months.
Results: Helix 2.5, pretrained on this data, achieved 56% zero-shot success in 30 unseen Bay Area homes, up from 9% without Index. NVIDIA's GR00T efforts are cited as another example of buying human hours. The quoted post also links a guide to building an Optimus-style 3-layer robot brain at home for $0–230.
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