{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-08-25-figure-index-dataset/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-08-25-figure-index-dataset/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2026-08-25-figure-index-dataset","date":"2026-08-25","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Figure launches Index, a paid crowdsourced human-video pipeline to train humanoids","deck":null,"takeaway":null,"category":"robotics","category_label":"Robotics","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"Figure: Introducing Index","url":"https://www.figure.ai/news/introducing-index","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"figure.ai"},{"n":2,"title":"Runtime Wire: Figure launches Index","url":"https://runtimewire.com/article/figure-index-human-video-robot-training-data","type":"press","group":"press","domain":"runtimewire.com"}],"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["Figure AI"],"title":"Figure launches Index, a paid crowdsourced human-video pipeline to train humanoids","summary":"On 2026-08-25 Figure took its Index program out of stealth: an app that pays people worldwide to film household and workplace tasks, which had already gathered 16M videos from 108 countries and pays ~$15M to contributors so far, to pretrain its Helix robot foundation model.","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"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["humanoid","data","robot-learning"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nIndex turns human egocentric video into the pretraining corpus for robots: submissions go through quality filters, fraud review, deduplication, rebalancing and hierarchical captioning.\nThree weeks later Figure showed that Index pretraining yields a 6x jump in zero-shot household task success (Helix 2.5).\n\n## Why it matters\n\nData 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).","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2026-09-17-figure-helix-2-5","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-17-figure-helix-2-5/","date":"2026-09-17","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Figure Helix 2.5: humanoids do chores zero-shot in 30 never-seen homes","deck":null,"takeaway":"This is among the strongest public evidence that robot foundation models scale with human video, and that humanoids can generalize to unseen real homes — a core prerequisite for home robots.","category":"robotics","category_label":"Robotics","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":4,"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["Figure AI"]}],"people":[],"posts":[],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-09-29","type":"filed","text":"Created"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-09-29","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-09-29","human_review":null,"version":{"date":"2026-10-04"}},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":117,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":56,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"gemini-4-hydrogen","name":"Gemini 4 Hydrogen","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":147,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":86,"in_training_data":false}],"short_url":"https://postcutoff.com/s/figure-index-paid-crowdsourced"}