Nvidia has discussed investing an additional $1 billion in humanoid robot maker Figure, which is seeking more funding at a pre-money valuation of about $38 billion. Nvidia previously invested in Figure at the same valuation about a year ago.
Figure released a video of a furnace farewell ceremony for its retired F.02 robot. Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested the robot jump into the furnace itself and attended the event, wearing protective gear and leading an F.02 toward the furnace in a tribute to Terminator 2. Due to lithium battery safety concerns, a suitable facility was found in Imatra, Finland. Figure also trained an AI model to make the robot jump into the furnace in a spectacular way.
Humanoid robot company Figure released Helix 2.5, allowing robots to autonomously do housework. The model was pretrained on the global human-behavior dataset Index and achieved zero-shot generalization across 30 households in the San Francisco Bay Area, raising task success from 8% to 56% and generalizing to 30 new environments with only half the task-specific data.