Figure AI: Robots around the corner
You know you’re doing something right when your start-up is yet to blow out the candles on its second birthday cake but you’ve got a dream team of investors lining up to give you $675m to play with in a funding round that values the company at $2.6bn.
This is the happy situation facing Figure AI, which is harnessing rapid progress in AI and robotics to develop general-purpose humanoids, with the modest ambition to “positively impact humanity and to build the largest company on the planet”.
Figure estimates that there are 10-million unsafe or undesirable jobs in the US alone that could happily be handed over to humanoids, let alone the potential for helping out around the home and caring for the elderly, before they even start to explore the potential of building new worlds on other planets.
To begin with, the company will focus on tasks that are structured and repetitive, but the expectation is that technology will advance rapidly to allow the robots to complete complex tasks more effectively than any human.
Investors include Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI, and Figure is collaborating with them to accelerate development. It is working with OpenAI on speech-to-speech interaction with humans, and with Microsoft on AI infrastructure, training and cloud storage. It has signed its first commercial deal with BMW, to deploy its robots in BMW’s US factories, and it has just announced that it has delivered its first F.02 humanoid to a commercial client. The company is moving at considerable speed as it races to take advantage of a huge opportunity.
Vail Resorts: Ice-bound on the snow
With global warming leaving many Alpine resorts looking more suitable for a mud wrestle than any more recognised winter sports, even the most hardened European skiers are starting to look enviously towards the bottomless powder of the American west.
Clearly there are adjustments to be made, largely the complete lack of any decent restaurants up the mountain, and any thought of drinking your body weight in Aperol while dancing on tables before weaving your way down to the resort will definitely bring you to the attention of the sheriff.
The US ski resort sector has been undergoing a period of consolidation led by the behemoth that is Vail Resorts, which owns 41 resorts and will happily sell you its Epic Pass that will give you access to all of them, plus a couple in Europe and Japan.
Vail will tell you that its scale enables it to invest in upgrading lift networks and installing the snow-making equipment that is particularly important in the northeast of the US, but it is facing a backlash from the ski community for driving prices way out of reach of the locals and the MAGA boys, and for cramming the punters in.
Things came to a head over the holiday period when ski patrollers at Park City went on strike over pay and working conditions, meaning that only a fraction of the resort was open, pistes were dangerously crowded and lift queues hit two to three hours — not ideal when you’ve paid up to $300 for a day pass. If it’s to thrive, it may have to start putting customers ahead of shareholders.
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