Human intern edges Figure AI robot by 192 packages

Aime, an intern, sorted 12,924 packages during a live-streamed 10-hour contest hosted by Figure AI, finishing 192 packages ahead of the company’s F.03 humanoid, which processed 12,732 packages.

Figure AI staged the “Man vs. Machine” challenge to compare a human and its F.03 humanoid on a repetitive warehouse task. Brett Adcock, Figure AI’s CEO, described the assignment as: detect a barcode, pick up a package and place it barcode-down on a conveyor belt. Both competitors repeated that routine over the same 10-hour period.

Aime was allowed meal breaks and paid rest breaks required under California labor law. The F.03 did not pause. Around the fifth hour the robot briefly took the lead while Aime used the restroom, but Aime retook and kept the lead through the finish.

On average Aime processed each package in 2.79 seconds. The F.03 averaged 2.83 seconds per package, a difference of 0.04 seconds per item that accumulated into the 192-package margin.

Aime reported blisters on his fingers and severe pain in his left forearm after the shift. Figure AI noted the contest covered a single shift and that the F.03 can run continuously across multiple shifts without human rest breaks.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman forecast: ‘White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.’

The event was organized and live-streamed by Figure AI to measure how its humanoid performs against a person on a defined manual sorting task.