It has just launched the new inference model o3-mini and the new agent DeepResearch, and has reached new cooperation with SoftBank and South Korea's Kakao. OpenAI has still not been able to retain Figure as a partner. On February 4, local time, Brett Adcock, the founder of the robotics company, announced that Figure had decided to terminate its cooperation with OpenAI.

Figure has made a major breakthrough in fully self-developed, completely end-to-end robot AI. In the next 30 days, the company will show the outside world "something that has never been seen on humanoid robots."

One stone stirred up a thousand waves. Some people in the comments expressed concern, or were optimistic that Figure "can fully control its own destiny." Others asked whether Figure will be equipped with DeepSeek large models. However, founder Adcock did not respond, but posted a recruitment notice in the comment area: "If you are interested in bringing embodied intelligence to the world on a large scale, please consider joining our AI team."


In fact, Figure’s cooperation with OpenAI only lasted less than a year.

On February 29, 2024, Figure announced the completion of a US$675 million Series B financing. At that time, investors included Microsoft, Intel, OpenAI Startup Fund, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Nvidia, etc. At the same time, the company announced an agreement with OpenAI, and the cooperation includes OpenAI building a specialized AI model for the Figure humanoid robot.

Figure's second-generation humanoid robot Figure02, released in August of the same year, uses the OpenAI model for natural language communication. Compared with the previous generation, this robot has more powerful vision, perception, interaction capabilities and a hand comparable to that of a human. It can use the AI ​​vision system to better perceive the physical world and complete a series of actions such as grabbing objects and flipping the wrist.

Earlier this year, there was news that OpenAI had further increased its interest in humanoid robots and was even considering developing a humanoid robot.

As for why the cooperation was terminated, Figure founder Adcock gave a more detailed explanation in an interview with Techcrunch.

He said,The problem with working with OpenAI is "Integration". OpenAI is large in scale, has a wide range of business, and has large models to match, but assembling AI for specific objects such as robots is not OpenAI's main focus.The right solution should be to build an end-to-end AI model focused on specific hardware.

“We found that if we want to solve embodied intelligence problems at scale in the real world, we have to vertically integrate robotic AI. We can’t outsource AI (large models) for the same reason that we can’t outsource hardware.”

It is worth mentioning thatTesla, which is also targeting end-to-end large models, may also be about to release a humanoid robot update. On January 7, local time, Musk revealed during a game live broadcast, "In the next few weeks, we may update Optimus (the humanoid robot Optimus Prime). It is progressing very smoothly and the team has done a great job."