No Priors Ep. 58 | The argument for humanoid robots with Brett Adcock from Figure
Sarah Guo (host), Brett Adcock (guest)
In this episode of No Priors, featuring Sarah Guo and Brett Adcock, No Priors Ep. 58 | The argument for humanoid robots with Brett Adcock from Figure explores brett Adcock bets on humanoid robots as universal labor platform Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI, explains why humanoid, general‑purpose robots could become the largest business in the world by automating a massive share of human labor. He argues that now is the first moment the core technologies—batteries, actuators, locomotion control, and advanced AI models—are good enough to make bipedal robots commercially viable. Figure is starting with industrial use cases like manufacturing and logistics, while simultaneously pushing toward household robots, using end‑to‑end neural models and speech as the primary interface in partnership with OpenAI. Adcock details Figure’s highly vertically integrated, fast-iteration hardware/software development approach, and discusses societal acceptance, safety, and implications for the AGI timeline.
Brett Adcock bets on humanoid robots as universal labor platform
Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI, explains why humanoid, general‑purpose robots could become the largest business in the world by automating a massive share of human labor. He argues that now is the first moment the core technologies—batteries, actuators, locomotion control, and advanced AI models—are good enough to make bipedal robots commercially viable. Figure is starting with industrial use cases like manufacturing and logistics, while simultaneously pushing toward household robots, using end‑to‑end neural models and speech as the primary interface in partnership with OpenAI. Adcock details Figure’s highly vertically integrated, fast-iteration hardware/software development approach, and discusses societal acceptance, safety, and implications for the AGI timeline.
Key Takeaways
Humanoid form is a pragmatic interface to a human‑designed world.
Adcock argues the question isn’t whether human anatomy is optimal, but that our environment is already built around average human capabilities; a single humanoid platform can amortize R&D across millions of tasks instead of creating thousands of bespoke robots.
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The enabling tech stack for useful humanoids has only just matured.
Improvements in lithium‑ion energy density, motor torque/power density, robust bipedal locomotion controllers, and large language/vision models together cross a threshold that made this infeasible a decade ago but viable today.
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Real-world deployment will start in industrial settings before homes.
Figure is targeting manufacturing and logistics work cells first (e. ...
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Vertical integration is less philosophy than necessity in humanoids.
Despite preferring to buy components, Figure has been forced to design and often manufacture most core systems (actuators, OS, sensors) due to an immature supply chain and the absence of off‑the‑shelf parts that meet performance requirements.
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Fast, iterative hardware development is treated like high‑stakes agile.
Figure uses clear requirements, structured design gates (conceptual, preliminary, critical design reviews), and aggressive rapid prototyping to shorten hardware cycles; speed is a core hiring criterion because slow iteration can doom complex hardware programs.
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Speech plus vision-language models will be the primary robot interface.
In partnership with OpenAI, Figure is building a two‑layer “brain” where a high‑level VLM handles language and task decomposition, while Figure’s lower‑level neural controllers output motor trajectories, enabling speech‑to‑speech, end‑to‑end embodied reasoning.
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Humanoids could meaningfully shape the AGI timeline and its impacts.
Adcock believes physical interaction data from robots is important for advancing AGI and that solving humanoid actuation pre‑AGI is critical to avoid a dystopian future where superintelligent systems rely on humans as their primary actuators.
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Notable Quotes
““Half of GDP is human labor… it’s going to be the biggest business in the world by probably order of magnitude.””
— Brett Adcock
““When people ask, ‘Is the humanoid the right form factor?’ it’s the wrong question… The world was optimized specifically for us.””
— Brett Adcock
““We don’t even know where the upper bound is right now… that’s what’s really exciting for us over the next 24 months.””
— Brett Adcock
““I don’t think you can build a humanoid robots company without kind of going all in on all of it.””
— Brett Adcock
““My hope is that we can figure out the humanoid thing prior to [AGI]… otherwise we are the actuators for the model.””
— Brett Adcock
Questions Answered in This Episode
What specific technical or safety milestones must humanoid robots achieve before Figure is comfortable putting them into ordinary homes?
Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI, explains why humanoid, general‑purpose robots could become the largest business in the world by automating a massive share of human labor. ...
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How will labor markets and regulation respond if humanoids become cost‑competitive with low‑wage human work at scale?
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What are the concrete failure modes Figure is most worried about in combining powerful vision-language models with physical actuation?
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How does Figure plan to govern data collection from robots deployed in workplaces and homes to address privacy and misuse concerns?
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If humanoids become ubiquitous, what kinds of new jobs, industries, or social norms does Adcock anticipate emerging around them?
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Transcript Preview
(instrumental music plays) Hi, listeners. Welcome to another episode of No Priors. Today, we're here with Brett Adcock, the founder and CEO of Figure AI, which is developing and delivering humanoid general purpose robots that can do unsafe and undesirable jobs. They recently announced a monster round of funding, 675 million, from Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Intel, and Jeff Bezos. Brett, thanks so much for doing this.
Yes, sir.
You have this wild company, uh, doing humanoid robots. You just raised, uh, almost $700 million. Can you talk a little bit about how you get from, uh, a farm to software to, uh, vertical takeoff and landing to ro- humanoids?
Pretty normal path. (laughs)
Yeah. That's what I did too.
Yeah. (laughs) Yeah. So my story started in, I grew up in Illinois on a third generation farm. And, um, it ended up basically at a pretty early age started coding and getting to software and building things. Um, and that basically has been now about 20 years of building companies. Um, a little over 10 in software and a little under 10 in hardware. Um, at one point I started a software company and sold it, and then I started a company called, um, Archer Aviation. We build, uh, electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And then, uh, about 21 months ago, I started Figure.
Can we pause there for a second? Because most people aren't like, "Oh, I'll just start an aircraft company." Like, how do you go from a software business, feels less exotic to me, to that?
I grew up around a lot of hardware, and so I, um, I looked at hardware as like I really wanted for a long time to build hardware, build like, um, kind of E- areas of deep tech.
Mm-hmm.
Only way to really do that was like self fund your own venture and get it really moving. So after I sold, I sold Vettery in 2017, and right away I knew I wanted to build electric aircraft. And I actually went back down to-
Do you fly planes or something? And-
I'm super passionate about A- like A, fixing traffic problems. We, we have like, you know, half the world live in cities and traffic's just getting worse and worse. There's just been no... There's been no solution there. And two is, um, big believer in sus- sustainable transport. Uh, I think, you know, all transport besides rockets will move electric, uh, hopefully in our lifetime. So what we do at Archer is we build vertical takeoff and landing aircrafts. So aircraft are kinda like helicopters but fully electric. Uh, they can take off among helicopter landing pads, like inside of a city, and they can take you from here back to San Francisco in under 20 minutes.
I'm sold.
That'd be a dream (laughs) -
It is.
... instead of driving for two hours. So, it was really hard business. I, I basically started the company out of University of Florida. Um, I did, I started, uh, in engineering at University of Florida and, um, basically built a lab there for the first two years and built aircraft. And then moved the company out to California about three or four years ago.
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