Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock went on the Shawn Ryan Show and torched his former partnership with OpenAI, calling it little more than a branding exercise that delivered no real value.

"We Just Got No Value"

OpenAI co-led Figure's $675 million Series B in early 2024, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. The two companies signed a collaboration to build AI models for humanoid robots. Less than a year later, Adcock pulled the plug.

"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." He added that his internal team, built from Google DeepMind veterans, "ran circles" around OpenAI's engineers.

The Breaking Point

The core issue was practical. Embodied AI requires hands-on testing with physical robots, not loss curves in simulations. "In robotics, you've got to run the robot, see how it does," Adcock explained. "We just had a hard time getting them in the office."

The final straw came when OpenAI called to say it was exploring humanoid development internally. By then, Sam Altman and other 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."

Walking the Walk

During the same episode, Adcock demonstrated Figure 03 live. The 5'6", 130-pound robot walked alongside Ryan using fully AI-driven locomotion across 40 joints. It features palm cameras for object tracking, tactile fingertip sensors, and wireless foot-pad charging. Figure now has over 50 engineers building Helix, its in-house vision-language-action model, and is valued at $39 billion.