Nvidia GPUs Power Jeff Bezos-Backed Figure AI As It Competes With Elon Musk’s Tesla In Humanoid Robotics

Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock emphasizes Nvidia Corp.’s NVDA crucial role in the development of advanced humanoid robots, positioning the chipmaker as essential to the emerging sector amid competition with Tesla Inc. TSLA.

What Happened: “We use Nvidia in two ways today. We use both for training new models that we do quite a lot now and for on-board inference,” Adcock said during an early March interview with Amit Kukreja. “We need some sort of way to command actions out of the robot… I think they’re great. [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang is a great guy and the team has been supportive.”

Adcock’s company has made remarkable progress since its founding less than three years ago, developing two versions of its humanoid robots and creating a foundation model called Helix AI designed to reason like humans. According to Reuters, the company recently reached a valuation of $39.5 billion and has begun shipping robots to commercial customers.

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Why It Matters: Figure AI recently secured $675 million in funding from investors including Microsoft Corp. MSFT, OpenAI, and Jeff Bezos. This investment prompted Tesla CEO Elon Musk to respond with “Bring it on” via social media, pitching Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot as a direct competitor.

Tesla’s Optimus has been in development for two years. During Tesla’s second quarter of 2023 earnings call, Musk predicted the robot would become capable enough to perform “something useful” in Tesla factories in 2024.

Adcock believes Figure AI has advantages in vertical integration, suggesting that successful humanoid robots require tight coordination between hardware and AI.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.