The Robot in Your Kitchen

A dozen or so young men and women, eyes obscured by VR headsets, shuffle around a faux kitchen inside a tech company's Silicon Valley headquarters. Their arms are bent at the elbows, palms facing down. One pilot stops to pick up a bottle of hot sauce from a counter, hinging at the waist, making sure to keep her hands in view of the camera on her headset at all times. Meters away, two humanoid robots, with bulbous joints and expressionless plastic domes for faces, stand at a desk. In front of each is a crumpled towel; to its right, a basket. More often than not, the towel catches on the edge of the basket and the robot freezes. Then an engineer steps in and returns the towel to a crumpled heap, and the sequence begins again. This was the scene inside the Silicon Valley headquarters of Figure AI on an August morning this year. The three-year-old startup was in a sprint ahead of the October announcement of its next robot, the Figure 03, which was undergoing top-secret training when TIME visited.