The argument for humanoid AI robots with Brett Adcock from Figure

**Sarah** (0:05)
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.

**Brett Adcock** (0:31)
Yes, sir.

**Sarah** (0:32)
You have this wild company doing humanoid robots. You just raised almost $700 million.
Can you talk a little bit about how you get from a farm to software to vertical takeoff and landing to rope humanoids?

**Brett Adcock** (0:47)
Pretty normal path.

**Sarah** (0:48)
Yeah. That's what I do too.

**Brett Adcock** (0:51)
So my story started, and I grew up in Illinois on a third-generation farm.
It ended up basically at a pretty early age, started coding and getting the software and building things. That basically has been now about 20 years of building companies. A little over 10 in software and a little under 10 in hardware. At one point, I started a software company and sold it, and then I started a company called Archer Aviation. We build electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. Then about 21 months ago, I started Figure.

**Sarah** (1:29)
Can we pause there for a second because most people aren't like, I'll just start an aircraft company. How do you go from a software business feels less exotic to me to that?

**Brett Adcock** (1:38)
I grew up on a lot of hardware.
I looked at hardware as like I really wanted for a long time to build hardware, build areas of deep tech. The only way to really do that was self-fund your own venture. And get it really moving. So after I sold, I sold Vetteri in 2017 and right away, I knew I wanted to build electric aircraft. And I actually went back down to-

**Sarah** (2:02)
You fly planes or something?

**Brett Adcock** (2:03)
I'm super passionate about a fixing traffic problems.
We have like half the world lives in cities and traffic is just getting worse and worse. There's just been no solution there. And two is big believer in sustainable transport. I think all transport besides rockets will move electric, hopefully in our lifetime. So what we do at Archer is we build vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. So aircraft that are kind of like helicopters, but fully electric.
They can take off from a helicopter landing pads, like inside of a city, and they can take you from here back to San Francisco in under 20 minutes.

**Sarah** (2:35)
And sold.

**Brett Adcock** (2:36)
That would be a dream, right? Instead of driving for two hours. So that was really hard business. I basically started the company out of University of Florida. I started in engineering at University of Florida. And 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.

**Sarah** (2:56)
That's now a public company.
It's on the clearance path. How do you go from that to humanoid robots?

**Brett Adcock** (3:02)
I would say less of a leap from software into Archer than it was from Archer to figure.

**Sarah** (3:06)
Yeah, but what's the thesis for it?

**Brett Adcock** (3:08)
The thesis here is that if you assume that technologies are possible to build a humanoid robot, and just for listeners, humanoid means human form. So legs, arms, hands.
And you can do basically human-like work with a humanoid robot. A, it's going to be the biggest business in the world by probably order of magnitude. Half of GDP is human labor, like an order of magnitude bigger than like all of transportation market. It's just an enormous industry. Two is we think we can have like significant economical value if we can basically have robots doing real work every single day. I think it will be an age of abundance as it relates to goods and services prices.
And three is I think we'll have a over enough time, I think we'll have an impact on the AGI timeline here. It distills down to perhaps the most important business I think I could be working on in my life. So I left 21 months ago to start Figure. And what we're trying to do here is commercialize humanoid robots. We're trying to get them in the market in a significant way, build a fleet of robots, and then build a new data engine, train those robots on how to do useful work.

**Sarah** (4:09)
Why does being humanoid matter? Right, I think there are plenty of people who work in robotics that say like, bipedal is really unstable. There are lots of reasons that these humanoid forms are not optimal for doing lots of different work. We can have 10 arms and be stronger and whatever else.