Figure AI: hardware paired with foundation models
Figure AI has positioned itself around combining humanoid hardware with large AI foundation models for perception and manipulation — the same broad wave of model advances that has driven progress in language and vision AI applied to robot control. Figure has pursued real, publicly known pilot work, including a widely reported collaboration with BMW involving humanoid robots performing tasks in an automotive assembly environment. That kind of named, real-world industrial pilot is meaningfully different from an internal lab demo, because it involves an outside company willing to let the robot operate, even in a limited capacity, in a live production-adjacent setting.
The strategic bet here is that the fastest path to a genuinely capable humanoid isn't purely better mechanical design, it's pairing reasonably capable hardware with rapidly improving AI models for vision, planning, and manipulation, similar to how the AI industry broadly has bet on scaling models rather than only hand-engineering behavior.