10/16/2025
🏆 One of TIME’s Best Inventions 2025! 🏆
Big news: heat it™ just made it onto TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025 list! 🙌
This annual list celebrates innovations that make our lives smarter, better and more sustainable — and we’re proud to see our little device among them.
A huge shoutout to our amazing team for turning an idea into a global success story! 🌍💪
The Figure 03 is on the cover of TIME’s Best Inventions issue. It also might one day be in your kitchen.
Achieving “general robotics”—building a humanoid robot that can navigate the unpredictabilities of the world with the same fluidity as a person—has for decades remained a distant dream. Until now. Dozens of companies are racing to be the first to create a viable humanoid robot.
Figure stands out among its rivals because it is overtly targeting putting robots in the home—a domain that many of its competitors believe is still many years away. “Every home will have a humanoid,” says Figure AI’s CEO, Brett Adcock.
General robotics, he proclaimed in July, would be solvable within 24 months. Perhaps 18. Of course, tech CEOs are known for making exaggerated claims. But Adcock’s optimism is at least partially grounded in real progress. In the past three years, computer scientists have developed AI that for the first time can do something that approaches “understanding” our messy world. These neural networks can take an image or video and tell you what appears to be going on. They can follow complex, vague, or open-ended instructions. They can simulate reasoning.
In September, Figure invited a TIME photo and video team into Adcock’s family home to shoot the robot. During that shoot the Figure 03, completed just weeks earlier, successfully loaded a dishwasher and cleared clutter from a table. But the robot also had difficulty folding t-shirts, under heavy supervision. Still, it’s clear that innovation is proceeding quickly at Figure.
A central truth about today’s AI is that it is unpredictable. But a hallucination by a chatbot is annoying; a hallucination by a robot could be deadly. Adcock professes to take safety seriously. He is testing a Figure 03 in his own home, where he has young children. (There the machine is subject to “hardcore babysitting,” he says.)
If there’s even a small chance that this audacious company—or its competitors—can succeed in its goal, the implications would be nothing less than world-changing.
Read the full cover story here: https://time.com/7324233/figure-03-robot-humanoid-reveal/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=091025
