Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI, has opened up about why he walked away from a high-profile collaboration with OpenAI—and he wasn’t diplomatic about it. Speaking on the Shawn Ryan Show last week, Adcock said his internal team “ran circles” around OpenAI’s engineers and that the partnership amounted to little more than a branding exercise.“We just got no value out of the whole relationship,” Adcock said. “There was some good brand association there, but beyond that—wasn’t much.”OpenAI co-led Figure’s $675 million Series B round in early 2024 alongside Microsoft, valuing the company at $2.6 billion at the time. The two companies also signed a collaboration agreement to build next-generation AI models for humanoid robots. Less than a year later, Adcock ended it.
Why Adcock says robotics AI can’t be outsourced
Adcock’s core argument is that embodied AI—the kind that lets a robot navigate the physical world—is fundamentally different from building a chatbot. You can’t evaluate a robot by looking at loss curves in a simulation. You have to put it in a room and watch it move.That operational reality made working with OpenAI frustrating. “In robotics, you’ve got to run the robot, see how it does,” Adcock said. “We just had a hard time getting them in the office.”Meanwhile, his own team—built largely from Google DeepMind veterans and top AI researchers—was pulling ahead fast. Adcock now has over 50 engineers working on Helix, Figure’s in-house vision-language-action model that powers its robots.
The phone call that ended everything
The final break came when OpenAI called to say it was exploring humanoid development internally. By that point, Adcock felt his team had been unintentionally coaching a future competitor. Sam Altman and other OpenAI leaders had visited Figure’s Sunnyvale office and seen its neural network in action.“I was just like, ‘This is over,'” Adcock said. “We’re teaching you how to do robot learning. There’s no way we’re going to keep doing that.”OpenAI has not formally responded, though staffer Tao Xu reposted the clip on X calling the account “not true.”Figure AI’s Figure 03 robot walked alongside Melania Trump at the White House on March 25 during a summit on technology and children’s education—arguably the highest-profile public appearance for any humanoid robot in US history.
