Figure AI says its flagship humanoid is more autonomous than ever thanks to its newly upgraded robot brain.
The Silicon Valley startup, valued at $39 billion, shared footage of its third-generation humanoid, the Figure 03, unloading and reloading a dishwasher entirely on its own. Figure claims this is the longest, most complex autonomous yet performed by a humanoid robot.
The actions were powered by the startup’s self-developed Helix 02 vision language action (VLA) model. Figure introduced Helix AI last year after severing ties with OpenAI. According to Figure, the AI model has been enhanced to control the robot’s entire body rather than just its arms and hands as demonstrated in previous demos.
Most modern humanoids rely on multiple control systems that handle bipedal locomotion, balance, and manipulation, often by separate software modules. Figure says Helix eliminates the fragmentation by directly connecting what the robot sees and hears to how its entire body moves. Helix 02 treats perception as an ongoing process rather than a pre-step so the robot can adapt fluidly as objects shift, slip, or appear differently during extended autonomous tasks.
(Source: Figure AI)
The Figure 03 perceives its surroundings through a suite of cameras and sensors. Head-mounted cameras give it wide-area scene understanding, while wrist-embedded lenses provide close-up, task-level visual feedback during manipulation. The approach is similar what Singaporean startup Sharpa Robotics and China’s UBTECH have demonstrated with their AI-powered humanoids.
Figure dropped the demo as former Meta AI scientist Yann LeCun went viral for comments critical of the humanoid industry. At Davos 2026, he said: “Absolutely none of the humanoid companies have any idea how to make those robots smart enough to be useful.” The comments caught the attention of Elon Musk, who posted on X, “Why is Yann such a Negative Nancy all the time? He thinks if he can’t do it, no one can.”
Figure is racing to deploy at least 100,000 humanoids by 2029. The startup, launched in 2022 by Archer Aviation founder Brett Adcock, initially focused on industrial applications but has expanded its focus to households. Adcock has said he wants the robots to be priced around $20,000 once production is scaled.