A holdover from meteorologists or electrical engineers claiming expertise to deny climate change, or some neurologist using their medical background to hold forth on why Covid masks don’t work when they have no background in virology or epidemiology. And my own background of occasionally having to point out in public hearings that the resident who (correctly) said he was an engineer actually isn’t qualified to conduct a traffic analysis, because they’re a civil engineer and not a traffic engineer. So I’m always stirred to ‘look under the hood,’ as it were, when someone notes that they have a technical background (like “engineer” or “doctor”) that can be in a completely different area than the one they’re talking about.
Deneb was also a factory simulation software company. If you wanted a program that would simulate fluid flow through your plastic press, for example, they were your guys. But they weren’t doing AI or designing robots. This guy is a software engineer who designed simulations for use in designing factory equipment - which certainly makes him an engineer, but an engineer who’s never done anything in the specific field of AI he’s talking about. Certainly gives him more background knowledge than, say, a lawyer - but not someone who would qualify as being more than a well-informed lay person to talk about these things.
So with a skeptic’s eye, the Figure video is basically a visual press release. They’re trying to hype up their business, which will help them with both recruiting and attracting later-round VC funding. Which is fine - Boston Dynamic used to do these highly-produced videos, too, to make people excited about their robots. But it’s not something that really signals that there’s been some dramatic change in the capabilities of these robots that warrants too much excitement.