Every week, I organize 400 to 700 links into roughly 60 categories as part of my ongoing effort to learn about AI. This is my personal notebook, which I enjoy sharing with friends… a hobby and a labor of love, rather than a commercial publication or product.
If you arrived here through a search or shared link, this page collects the links I found for Figure for the week ending August 14, 2026.
As part of my learning process, I like to automate the category covers. It gives me a chance to learn Python and APIs.
This week’s cover prompt was written using Claude Opus 4.7, and the image was generated using Nano Banana 2.1.
Category Cover Image Prompt: A photorealistic magazine-cover image of a single sleek white and charcoal humanoid robot sitting cross-legged in profile with open palms resting on its knees, head slightly bowed in quiet resolution, on a softly reflective pale floor dissolving into deep indigo mist, lit by soft diffused dawn light with one thin thread of warm gold across its shoulder, vast empty negative space filling two thirds of the frame above, bold clean title text reading Figure set large in the open sky, minimalist fine-art still life, calm settled and quietly joyful.
This Week in Figure News
Summary by Claude Sonnet 5.5 based on this week’s links:
- Hands as the priority: Brett Adcock said that solving human-level intelligence in the physical world starts with the hands. In a separate post he called a tendon-based hand the biggest engineering mistake he made at Figure; it was the design for the 2022 F.01 robot.
- Hark Handoff, the computer-using agent: Adcock showed an unedited recording of Hark browsing Target, searching, clicking and entering a secure credit card payment. He said the agent went from 15 seconds per turn to 5. He also said he now uses Handoff for recruiting, a task that runs over a month-long horizon.
- A rival's logistics livestream: The Humanoid Hub reported that X Square ran an autonomous parcel-sorting livestream at 1,816 parcels per hour with 98% accuracy. It said that is about 45% faster than the sub-3-second pace Figure showed in its multiday livestream.
This summary was generated by Claude Sonnet 5.5 to help you explore the links below. Rest assured, I select, organize, and check the links by hand in Google Sheets, and write the introduction and personal commentary in The Main Newsletters myself each week as a labor of love.
This week's links related to Figure
This is an actual recording, end-to-end. Hark is navigating to Target, searching, clicking, & entering secure credit card payment When we started Handoff, our computer-using agent, it was 15 second/turn. We’re now at 5 second/turn & only getting faster!”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2085822671628226793
.@adcock_brett explains why @Figure_robot pivoted away from designing their humanoid robot’s hands after human hands: “This is extremely important. If we want to solve AGI and get to human intelligence in the physical world… it’s all going to start with the hands.” “Our”
https://x.com/sourceryy/status/2086979158496645508
My suspicion is that the recent string of problems – sandbox escapes, 11-figure model companies not realising that the last two releases had wrong measurements – are happening because everyone is vibing their benchmarks. We first noticed this six months ago on external data”
https://x.com/hrishioa/status/2087252719321133298
I’ve started using Hark Handoff for scaling our recruiting efforts It takes a new recruiter about 30 days to make a hire from a cold start. This makes the problem really difficult for autonomous computers, as they need to operate over a month-long time horizon Recruiting is”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2087220644811608524
X Square ran a fully autonomous logistics livestream: sorting parcels and flipping the barcode side up for the scanner. – 1,816 parcels/hour (~2 seconds per parcel) – 98% accuracy – ~45% higher throughput than Figure’s sub-3 seconds per parcel pace from its multiday livestream”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2087772610411262245
The biggest engineering mistake I made at Figure was building a tendon-based hand Our first hand design in 2022 was a tendon hand for our F.01 robot. At a high level, the tendon approach sounds appealing, which is why I chose it: you get more space for packaging actuators since”
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/2087927278458327179
Leave a Reply