Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

Building the robot itself is hard enough - but it was never the hardest part.

The thing to watch out for is: deployments. How many units are they pushing and to who. What kind of tasks can those robots accomplish well enough to warrant actually using them. How hard is it to adapt those robots to deployments. How that changes over time.

The hardest problem of creating a universal robot is, and always has been, AI. If Figure can deliver sharp, highly adaptive, easy to use AI? High generalization, good performance on a diverse range of tasks and in many environments out of the box? Then they have a killer product.

And a proxy to track that is reports of how many robots they deploy and to who. If they start shipping to small companies and deploying to high uncertainty spatially complex fields like construction or maintenance? If you start seeing robots unloading trucks and restocking shelves at a small town Walmart, unannounced? Big.

I think the glossy 7min trailer has it about right: The first realistic deployments will be champagne holders at parties and robots at hotel receptions. Novelty toys for the wealthy.

Commoditization and Walmart-level deployments at scale are still a few gens off.