Before Figure's robot tidies your home, Figure will send a person — who films the job

Figure came out of stealth on 25 August with Index, an app that pays people to film themselves doing ordinary chores. The company says it has paid out 15 million dollars so far — and the same app now lets you book one of those people to come and clean your house. The numbers Figure published are large for four months of work: 264,000 downloads across 108 countries, more than 44,000 weekly active users and over 16 million uploaded videos. The pipeline ingests 30 minutes of footage every second, which is 1,800 times faster than time itself passes, and which Figure converts into a striking figure: 4.9 years of human work uploaded every day. The company is unusually direct about why it built this. It first tried to buy training data, and says no vendor met its bar for throughput, diversity or quality. Diversity is the point being bought: per 1,000 hours collected, Index holds 373 distinct tasks, 1,146 distinct manipulated objects and 116 distinct environments — the long tail of kitty litter, oil changes and bussed restaurant tables that nobody writes into a task list in advance. Money is the other half of the announcement. Figure commits to spending more than one billion dollars on data and compute over the next 12 months, against 15 million dollars paid to Creators in four months. The release does not split that billion between people and server racks, and it does not say what a single video earns or what share of uploads survives the filters. Those filters are the part robotics labs rarely describe. Index runs five stages: automated screening for technical, visual and semantic quality; human analysts auditing users for deliberate attempts to game the filters; deduplication that discards clips too similar to accepted data; rebalancing against task quotas; and finally hierarchical text captions on every episode. The closing line of the announcement is the one worth reading twice. Index, Figure writes, "is laying the groundwork for ordering robots as a service" — today a person comes to clean your house, eventually a robot does everything. In the meantime, the worker taking the booking is also collecting the data meant to replace the booking. Figure states this openly rather than burying it, which is more than most of this industry manages.