Figure launches Index, a paid crowdsourced human-video pipeline to train humanoids
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra117 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.556 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen147 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.786 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 56 days before it.
Key facts
- 16 million videos uploaded; 264,000 app downloads; 44,000 weekly active contributors; 108 countries
- Processes ~30 minutes of uploaded video every second (~4.9 years of human work per day)
- Per 1,000 hours: 373 unique tasks, 1,146 unique objects, 116 unique environments
- $15M paid to creators to date; Figure commits >$1B on data and compute over the next 12 months
What happened
Index turns human egocentric video into the pretraining corpus for robots: submissions go through quality filters, fraud review, deduplication, rebalancing and hierarchical captioning. Three weeks later Figure showed that Index pretraining yields a 6x jump in zero-shot household task success (Helix 2.5).
Why it matters
Data scarcity is the core bottleneck for robot foundation models; Index is the largest attempt to buy real-world physical data at internet scale and has labor-market implications (people paid to demonstrate the work robots will learn).
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 1 primary, 1 press
Primary
- Figure: Introducing Indexfigure.ai, official
Press
- Runtime Wire: Figure launches Indexruntimewire.com, press
Changes
- Filed