The $15k domestic butler

Last week's unveil of the Figure 01 was jaw-dropping. But the implications of industrialising this technology are even more breath-taking.

The initial demo already made it feel like we're living in the future. A humanoid robot that is dexterous, intelligent, can see, hear, converse, follow instructions and reason.

But think about it. With the capabilities that Figure has already developed, they've built their own flywheel.

One of the first tasks at scale that the 01 can be deployed to do.... is to build more 01s.

So the factory can be staffed with (let's speculate) 70% AI humanoid workers, as opposed to human workers. Maybe the eventual figure can be even higher.

That means that the cost of production can be exponentially lower than normal tech hardware. Which means they will either have a really accessible price point, or a really high margin, or both.

Maybe they'll be cheap to buy but come with subscription-based add-ons.

Ford took 150 months to get to 1m cars, Tesla took 143.

When you imagine Figure using generative AI to accelerate the whole end-to-end process, from finding factory locations, building the factories, building 01s, superpowering marketing, product development, recruitment and a whole lot more - how long do you think it will take them to get to their first 1m 01s?

Tesla utilised three factories to support the production of its first million vehicles, and the last of those, Gigafactory Shanghai, went from breaking ground to production in 10 months.

I can't imagine that raising capital would be a problem for Figure, so let's imagine they can get to 1m units in 3 years from now, which would represent a 5x acceleration from what Ford and Telsa achieved. Given the exponential improvements we're used to seeing about genAI, that doesn't feel outlandish.

So let's jump ahead to what those units will be deployed to do. Factory workers, hazardous environment workers, burger flippers, domestic assistants... AI butler anyone? I bet if there was a consumer version for $15-20k, there would be a massive market for these.

Are they less complex to make than a Dacia Sandero? Is this price point realistic? Imagine the savings on a $15k intelligent humanoid worker, depreciated over let's say a 5 years, compared to the payroll cost of a human worker over the same period. With a reference payroll cost of $40,000 pa, that's $200k over 5 years vs $15k plus licensing/subscription costs.

That's scary. How tempted would McDonalds, Ford, Shell and thousands of other companies be, to replace a good chunk of any human manual workers with 01s?

And what about when 05s arrive? What will they be able to do? How safe are any of our jobs really?

Imagine a combination of 'embodied' and 'embedded' AI workers (ie physical and non-physical), taking over the majority of what humans do today. How long will it take? Given that last week we saw the 01 launched two days after Devin (the AI software developer), 5-10 years doesn't seem outlandish.