Descriptions:
Figure CEO Brett Adcock joined Bloomberg Technology to address widespread public skepticism about whether the company’s heavily-watched warehouse robot livestream involved hidden teleoperation. Adcock stated unequivocally that Figure’s humanoid robots operated fully autonomously for over 50 continuous hours using Helix 2, the company’s proprietary onboard neural network, processing more than 60,000 packages with virtually no downtime. He explained that the hand-raising motion some viewers flagged as a teleoperation signal is simply the robot’s standard behavior when turning to collect packages — a movement that occurs consistently and predictably throughout every shift.
The interview provides concrete operational benchmarks: robots currently process packages at approximately human speed (roughly three seconds per package) and are approaching the 90% barcode scan success rate required for sustained production use. Battery management is handled autonomously — when a robot’s charge runs low, it messages a replacement unit and walks to a wireless charging stand, keeping the conveyor line running continuously. Figure’s on-site manufacturing facility is currently producing 60 to 70 humanoid robots per week.
Adcock also addressed growing speculation that OpenAI may re-enter the robotics market, arguing that building a truly general-purpose humanoid robot requires end-to-end vertical integration across motors, actuators, sensors, battery systems, kinematics, AI training, and manufacturing — an approach Figure has pursued from founding. He identified training data for pretraining as one of the company’s two largest remaining bottlenecks on the path to broad commercial deployment.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Technology · Published May 15, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
