AI robot carries out 8 hour shift 'better than humans' in eye-opening live stream

For anyone who has been telling themselves that artificial intelligence taking our jobs is still a long way off, this week's footage from Figure AI might change your mind.

Figure AI livestreamed eight consecutive hours of its humanoid robot, Helix 02, working a full warehouse shift.

The robot worked autonomously at a pace matching that of an average human worker, identifying barcodes on delivery packages, picking them up, reorienting them so the barcode faced down, and placing them on a conveyor belt.

According to Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock, a human worker completes that same action in around three seconds.

"Watch a team of humanoid robots running a full 8-hr shift at human performance levels. This is fully autonomous running Helix-02," Adcock wrote on X alongside a clip of the stream.

Previous tests had only run the robots for an hour at a time, which meant there were, in his words, 'high odds something breaks' over the course of a full eight-hour session.

However, robotics expert Scott Walter wanted to see whether humanoid robots could survive long work hours like humans do. So they got a camera crew to record the event.

To account for any issues, the team built a system that doesn't require any human involvement.

"It's a multi-robot coordination with autonomous failover strategy. If a robot detects an issue - it will self diagnose itself and if there's an issue it autonomously walks to maintenance and requests a replacement from the fleet - no humans in the loop," Adcock explained.

What sets Helix 02 apart is that it runs three neural networks simultaneously. System 2 handles language understanding and planning, System 1 manages vision-to-motion, and System 0 handles real-time balance, reportedly replacing 109,504 lines of robotics code.

According to Yahoo, at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, Figure AI's robots moved more than 90,000 parts for over 30,000 vehicles during ten-hour shifts without human intervention.

The system is designed to run around the clock. Individual robots are rotated out every three to four hours, at which point they 'autonomously request another robot' from the fleet to keep the conveyor running with minimal downtime, Adcock noted.

People have been reacting to the viral livestream on X.

"RIP to human workers…," one user wrote.

"So amazing to see this kind of progress. Most people are obvious to the change coming," another added.

A third user commented: "If you worked this slowly in a real warehouse you’d be fired in 2 hours. The progress is impressive so far but the gap between this and actual human pace is still daunting".