Figure is paying people to film themselves doing chores

Figure took Index out of stealth on 25 August 2026. It is a phone app that pays people, whom the company calls Creators, to record themselves performing ordinary physical tasks: cooking, cleaning, laundry, stocking shelves, serving in cafes, working in logistics centres. The footage trains Helix, Figure’s robot foundation model.

The figures the company published are the story. Index has taken in more than 16 million videos across 108 countries, with over 44,000 weekly active users, and is processing 30 minutes of uploaded video every second. Figure says it has paid $15 million to contributors so far and has committed to spending over $1 billion on data and compute in the next twelve months. Per 1,000 hours collected, the dataset covers 373 distinct tasks, 1,146 manipulated objects and 116 environments.

The direction of transfer is worth naming plainly. Most of this site’s beat is machines extending what a body can do. Here the body is the training set: the capability moves the other way, from people who are paid by the minute to a model that will not need them once it has enough of their footage.