Robotics firms reportedly expand real-world data collection to train physical AI

TU News, citing the Financial Times, reports that developers are collecting footage in robot gyms, homes and workplaces to train physical AI, which cannot rely on web-based datasets the way language models can. TU News says Figure has about 44,000 active users recording tasks and plans to spend more than $1 billion over 12 months on training-data services and computing power. Researchers remain unsure whether simply gathering more data will improve performance.