At 3:30 a.m. today,ai A tweet from Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of robotics company Figure, has taken the entire AI community by surprise. He announced the termination of the partnership agreement with OpenAI, saying that Figure has made a major breakthrough in end-to-end robotic AI developed entirely in-house, and also promised to “show something that people have never seen on a humanoid robot in the next 30 days.”
In fact, it has been less than a year since the two high-profile companies started cooperation. On February 29 last year, Figure announced the completion of a staggering $675 million Series B funding round, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. Investors include Microsoft, Intel, OpenAI Startup Fund, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Nvidia, etc. At the same time, Figure also announced a partnership with OpenAI, including OpenAI building specialized AI models for Figure’s humanoid robots, enabling its bots to process and reason language.
Shortly after, they also released a video demonstrating how the Figure 01 robot can engage in a comprehensive conversation with humans with the help of OpenAI’s technology.
By August, the two companies also announced a new generation of Figure 02 Humanoid robotOpenAI’s models will be used for natural language communication.
It seems that the two companies seem to have entered a long honeymoon period – one is doing AI and the other is doing robots, which seems to be a match made in heaven, and OpenAI itself is also an investor in Figure, so it seems that no one expected that the partnership between the two companies would end so quickly.
But perhaps, OpenAI was already hinting at this signal when it announced the re-formation of its robotics team last month? For more details, please refer to the report on this siteOpenAI was revealed to be reorganizing its robot team, and 4 years ago it was short of money and data, and now it is going to do hardware layout》。 In addition, OpenAI also included “user-programmable humanoid robots” and “humanoid robots with communication and learning functions for assistance and entertainment” in its trademark application on January 31.
Considering that Brett Adcock posted a tweet about the recruitment of the AI team just below the above tweet, this speculation doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable.
I don’t know about the other one1X, a humanoid robot company that has a partnership with OpenAI How will they react?
1X’s Neo Beta Humanoid Robot
Figure’s tweet about his breakup with OpenAI drew a lot of discussion after it was posted. Some people welcomed Figure’s confidence and said they were looking forward to seeing what the company promised.
Of course, some people naturally expressed concern.
Others have tried to analyze the technical reasons behind this high-profile breakup.
The hottest topic “DeepSeek” recently also has a strong presence in the comment area.
According to TechCrunch, Adcock said the problem with Figure’s partnership with OpenAI is integration(Integration / Integration). “OpenAI is a large company with a wide range of businesses and has intelligent models to match. Embodied AI that brings AI to physical things like robots is not the main focus of this ChatGPT developer.” Adcock says the right solution is to build end-to-end AI models dedicated to driving specific hardware.
“We found that to solve embodied AI at scale in the real world, you have to vertically integrate robotic AI,” he said. We can’t outsource AI just as we can’t outsource hardware.”
OpenAI has not yet commented on the matter, but has quietly carried out a brand update.
Specific details about this sudden termination of cooperation are yet to be revealed. What do you think could be the reason for the end of Figure’s partnership with OpenAI?
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1886860098980733197
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/04/figure-drops-openai-in-favor-of-in-house-models/
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