@0x_meden
Figure has paid regular people $15 million to film themselves doing chores, and that data made its robot 6x better in homes it had never seen. it's an app called Index. you sign up, get a recording device and get paid by the minute while you fold laundry, make beds or clean a kitchen the numbers from Figure's own post: - 264,000 downloads in 108 countries - 44,000 people uploading every week - 16M+ videos, 30 minutes of footage every second, which Figure counts as 4.9 years of human work per day - $15M paid out so far, and over $1B committed to data and compute in the next 12 months then Figure pretrained Helix 2.5 on it and sent the robot into 30 Bay Area homes it had never seen, with zero data from any of them same task data, same evaluation: zero-shot success went from 9% without Index to 56% with it and Figure isn't the only one buying human hours: - NVIDIA trained GR00T N1.7 on 20K hours of EgoScale, people filming their own hands - Tesla hired data collection operators at $25–48/hr to wear motion-capture suits and VR headsets for Optimus - Mecka raised a $60M Series B, reportedly led by Sequoia, to pay people to record everyday tasks with body sensors main insight: two years ago, teaching a robot to fold a towel meant a lab, a teleop rig and someone with a PhD now the fastest way is paying a stranger to fold their own towel on camera, 44,000 strangers a week