Figure Opens Index: 16 Million Human Videos for Helix
Figure AI is putting a name on the data pipeline it has been running in stealth. On August 25 the company launched Index, a consumer app on Google Play and the App Store that pays people to record real household and workplace tasks for Helix, its robot model.
The numbers on the company page are not small. While the app sat unlabeled, Figure says it crossed 264,000 downloads in 108 countries, more than 44,000 weekly active users, and 16 million video uploads. The ingest rate is 30 minutes of video every second, which Figure converts as 4.9 years of human work uploaded per day. Creators have been paid $15 million. The company says it is now on a path to 100x that scale and is committed to spend over $1 billion on data and compute in the next 12 months.
What Index actually is
Figure tried buying data first. Vendors, it says, could not hit the throughput, diversity, or quality bar Helix needs, so it built its own collection system. Four months ago that system was an unlabeled app. Today it is Index.
Anyone can record chores at home or at work, or book a Creator through the app to come do the task on camera. The company lists cooking, cleaning, laundry, logistics centers, restaurants, factories, and offices, plus odd jobs like kitty litter, oil changes, and busing tables. Per 1,000 hours, Figure claims 373 unique tasks, 1,146 unique objects, and 116 unique environments.
Humanoids Daily, covering the same launch, ties Index to the earlier stealth effort Project Go-Big and notes Figure has already paid those $15 million and committed the $1 billion. Its write-up shows the headset capture and the app UI.
How the footage becomes training data
Ingesting that stream, Figure says, looks more like a consumer app than a lab logger: 24/7 availability, continuous processing, and real-time feedback to users. The pipeline has five stages:
- Filtering for technical, visual, and semantic quality
- Fraud review by human analysts at the user level
- Deduplication by embedding similarity
- Rebalancing with task quotas and embedding clusters
- Annotation as hierarchical text captions on every accepted episode
The weekly-active-user chart on Figure’s page climbs from near zero in early May to 44,436 by the week of August 21.
Figure’s close is explicit: Index is groundwork for ordering robots as a service. Today a person comes to clean; later, the company says, a robot will.
A Human’s Take
Paying thousands of people to film making a bed is a serious bet that human video, not more teleop hours on Figure’s own floor, is the scarce input. I want the follow-up they promised: does this footage actually move Helix on a shift, or is it a very expensive pile of chores? Until they show a robot doing the same rooms without a minder, treat the 16 million uploads as a data factory, not a finished skill.