GPT-5’s impact and capabilities might be debatable, but one of the charts from GPT-5’s presentation has certainly become a meme.
Figure CEO Brett Adcock has appeared to roast OpenAI’s Noam Brown with a reference to the “chart crime” bar chart from OpenAI’s GPT-5 presentation which had mis-sized bars which made GPT-5’s performance jump look a lot more impressive than it actually was. Figure had earlier unveiled what it described was the world’s first autonomous robot that could fold laundry. “For the first time, a humanoid robot can fold laundry using a neural net. We made no changes to the Helix architecture, only new data,” Adcock wrote on X. “The same Helix architecture that solved logistic tasks was applied directly to laundry folding. There were no modifications to the model or training hyperparameters. The only addition was the dataset,” he added. Adcock showed off a video of Figure’s humanoid robot, albeit gingerly and slowly, folding towels.
But this prompted a response from OpenAI’s Noam Brown, who said, “Does it still work if you raise the table 6 inches?” This has been a long-time complaint about robotics systems, that they’re hyper-optimized to their environment to produce impressive videos, but can’t actually function well in the real world when parameters and conditions change even slightly.
But Adcock wasn’t going to take this jibe lying down. He went ahead and created a video in which the table is raised approximately six inches during the folding, and the Figure robot continues folding towels like before. “Anything else Noam?” he captioned the video. And to add insult to injury, he shared the infamous GPT-5 chart. “Should we raise the middle chart by 6 inches?” he said.
Adcock not only managed to rebut Noam Brown’s question about Figure’s capabilities with video evidence, but also added in a zinger of his own with the GPT-5 bar chart. It’s also interesting that Figure and OpenAI execs are sparring like this on X — OpenAI’s startup fund is an investor in Figure, and Figure and OpenAI are collaborating to build next generation AI models for humanoid robots. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped Figure’s CEO from highlighting a gaffe from OpenAI’s presentation when one of its researchers seemed to question its robot’s capabilities. The AI space is cut-throat, and people don’t seem to take kindly to insinuations about deficiencies in their technology, even when it comes from investors and partners.