---
id: "2026-08-25-figure-index-dataset"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-08-25-figure-index-dataset/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2026-08-25"
date_precision: day
category: robotics
importance: 4
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-08-25-figure-index-dataset/

# Figure launches Index, a paid crowdsourced human-video pipeline to train humanoids

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

## 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).

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): 117 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): 56 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): 147 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): 86 days after its cutoff

## Sources

1. [Figure: Introducing Index](https://www.figure.ai/news/introducing-index) (figure.ai, official)
2. [Runtime Wire: Figure launches Index](https://runtimewire.com/article/figure-index-human-video-robot-training-data) (runtimewire.com, press)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2026-09-17: [Figure Helix 2.5: humanoids do chores zero-shot in 30 never-seen homes](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-17-figure-helix-2-5/index.md)