Intern beats Figure AI humanoid in 10-hour sorting test

Figure AI held a live-streamed “Man vs. Machine” challenge in which an intern named Aime completed 12,924 package-sorting actions over a continuous 10-hour shift, while the company’s F.03 humanoid logged 12,732.

Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock described the task as repeated steps: detect a barcode, pick up a package and place it barcode-down on a conveyor belt. Both the human and the robot ran the same sequence without variation for the full 10 hours.

Aime received meal and paid rest breaks under California labor rules. The humanoid briefly took the lead around the fifth hour when Aime took a bathroom break; the intern regained the lead and finished 192 packages ahead. The human averaged 2.79 seconds per package; the F.03 averaged 2.83 seconds per package.

Aime reported blisters on his fingers and described his left forearm as feeling broken by the end of the shift. Figure AI noted the contest covered a single 10-hour shift; the company’s humanoid is designed to operate continuously across shifts, so results for one shift may not reflect performance over multiple days.

Figure AI presented the event as a direct head-to-head test of a repetitive warehouse task. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted “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.” Figure AI characterized the challenge as an experiment in physical task automation rather than software-based office automation.