Figure Founder Puts in $100M for "Personal AI": Former Apple iPhone Air Designer Joins to Create a Series of AI Hardware

According to 1M AI News monitoring, humanoid robot company Figure CEO Brett Adcock announced the establishment of a new AI lab, Hark, with the goal of creating the "world's most advanced personal intelligence," integrating in-house developed multimodal models with custom hardware deeply to build a universal interaction interface between humans and machines. Hark has been operating in secret for 8 months, launched with a $1 billion personal investment from Adcock, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be $19.1 billion.

Adcock told Bloomberg that Hark is developing "a range of AI devices, both for personal and home use," with a form factor different from existing smartphones, wearables, and smart glasses. The first batch of AI models is planned to be released this summer, with hardware to follow.

On the team front, former Apple industrial designer Abidur Chowdhury has been appointed as the head of design. He worked at Apple for seven years, contributing to the design of the iPhone and Mac product lines, including the recent iPhone Air. The hardware team has also brought in former Apple employees David Narajowski and Dave Wilkes. On the AI research side, several senior researchers have been recruited from Meta's Superintelligence Lab. The team currently consists of about 45 people, expected to grow to 100 in the first half of the year, with members also coming from Google, Amazon, and Tesla. Hark has reached a computing power agreement with NVIDIA, with thousands of GPUs set to come online next month for model training.

Adcock is a serial entrepreneur who founded Figure in 2022, which was recently valued at $39 billion in its latest funding round. He has previously founded the recruiting platform Vettery ($100 million exit), the electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft company Archer (NYSE: ACHR), and the weapon detection company Cover. Figure will remain independently operated.