Figure Founder Invests $100 Million Out of Pocket for "Personal AI": Former Apple iPhone Air Designer Joins to Build a Series of AI Hardware

According to 1M AI News monitoring, humanoid robot company Figure CEO Brett Adcock announced the founding of a new AI laboratory, Hark, with the goal of creating “the world’s most advanced personal intelligence.” The lab will deeply integrate self-developed multimodal models with custom hardware to build a universal interaction interface between humans and machines. Hark has been operating in secret for 8 months, launched with a personal investment of $100 million by Adcock. Forbes estimates his net worth at $19.1 billion.

Adcock told Bloomberg that Hark is developing “a range of AI devices, both for personal and home use,” which will differ in form 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 side, former Apple industrial designer Abidur Chowdhury has been appointed head of design. He worked at Apple for seven years, participating in the design of the iPhone and Mac product lines, including the recent iPhone Air. The hardware team also brought in senior Apple employees David Narajowski and Dave Wilkes. For AI research, they recruited several senior researchers from Meta’s Superintelligence Lab. The team currently has about 45 members, expected to expand 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 coming online next month for model training.

Adcock is a serial entrepreneur. His company Figure, founded in 2022, recently reached a valuation of $39 billion. He also previously founded the recruiting platform Vettery (which was acquired for $100 million), electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft company Archer (NYSE: ACHR), and weapons detection company Cover. Figure will operate independently.