From “technocracy.news”
Jensen Huang says, “The ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner.” Tesla’s Optimus robot is predicted to be the biggest product in history, topping over $1 trillion in the first few years. Venture capital is flowing into the robot space with over $5 billion invested in new startups since 2024. China has beat Tesla to market with a 4-foot-3, 77-pound humanoid that sells for $16,000. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
In an office park opposite an Amazon warehouse, the robots are at work.
A trio of six-foot-tall machines with ostrichlike legs and two jointed arms work in shifts, walking off a charging rack to move boxes between two conveyor belts until it’s time to plug in again.
This vision of the future of labor is a test station at the end of an assembly line for building humanoid robots designed to fill jobs in warehouses and auto plants. Human engineers nearby watch for mistakes as the machines are put through their paces.
Agility Robotics, a 10-year-old company spun out of Oregon State University’s robotics lab, says its factory is designed to eventually manufacture 10,000 robots a year. Some it has built are already at work in e-commerce warehouses and auto parts factories.
Humanoid robots are long-standing icons of the future alongside space travel and flying cars. Some tech leaders and investors believe it’s now time to start bringing the robots, which share our basic body plan, to reality.
They argue that robots with legs, arms and fingers can literally step into our shoes, rapidly transforming the economy by working in homes and other spaces designed around the human form.
“If we could possibly build these amazing robots, we could deploy them in exactly the world that we’ve built for ourselves,” Jensen Huang, the CEO of AI chip company Nvidia and a central figure in today’s AI boom, told a packed arena during his keynote at the CES technology show in Las Vegas in January.
Huang stood flanked by 14 humanoid robots from different companies. He compared their potential to OpenAI’s breakthrough chatbot that spurred the ongoing AI revolution after its launch in November 2022. “The ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner,” Huang said. The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.
Academic and corporate workshops have built humanoid robots for decades, but they have largely been oddities, not productive workers. Putting machines on two legs instead of wheels or a fixed base introduces a host of engineering and safety problems, limiting how much they can lift and increasing the risk of falling onto nearby humans.
Now, advancements in robotics that make humanoid designs more capable and affordable are combining with the surge of investment in artificial intelligence to create a new drive to make humanoid robots practical.
Years of steady progress have made legged robots better at balancing and stepping through tricky terrain. Improved batteries allow them to operate for longer without trailing industrial power cords. AI developers are adapting the innovations behind services like ChatGPT to help humanoids act more independently.
“You have all the breakthroughs needed to be able to execute on this problem, which is building robots that interact with the real world like humans do,” said Sankaet Pathak, founder of the San Francisco-based humanoid robots company Foundation.
The progress has triggered a frenzy of investment in humanoid robots and made them into a mascot for the idea that AI will soon reorder the world on the scale tech leaders have promised.
Elon Musk, whose electric automaker Tesla is building its own humanoid called Optimus, has said that the robots will be “the biggest product ever in history” and that “every human is going to want one and some will want two.” Morgan Stanley analysts have predicted that the United States will have 78 million humanoid robots at work by 2050.
Venture capitalists have invested over $5 billion in humanoid robotics start-ups since the beginning of 2024, according to financial data firm Pitchbook, and the largest tech corporations are also placing bets.
Amazon, which has spent billions transforming e-commerce logistics with conventional industrial robots, contributed to a $150 million investment round in Agility in 2022 and has tested the company’s robots in its warehouses. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.
Meta is working on integrating its own AI technology with humanoid robots, and Google researchers are collaborating with Austin-based humanoid robot start-up Apptronik.
“We’re talking about the biggest market that any of us are going to see in our lifetime. It’s not a choice for these big tech companies of whether or not they’re going to play in it,” Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas said in an interview. “They basically have to.”
A host of humanoid robot companies has spawned in China, the world leader in complex manufacturing, where the government is subsidizing the industry. Six of the 14 robots that shared the stage with Nvidia’s Huang were made by Chinese companies; five were American. China’s Unitree sells a 77-pound humanoid that stands 4-foot-3 for $16,000.
AI language models, which power chatbots and research tools like ChatGPT, can break down an instruction like “make an omelet” into tasks for a robot to follow. But it’s still unclear how to reliably give machines the physical intelligence or intuition needed for things like gripping an egg and carefully breaking it into a bowl without specific programming.
Those challenges can be glossed over by the way a humanlike form makes robots more entertaining.
On a recent Friday evening, 20-somethings packed a former loading dock in the basement of an AI co-working space on San Francisco’s Market Street to watch a robot fight club.
Two Chinese-made humanoids from Unitree and Booster Robots faced off wearing boxing gloves and padded headgear. When one robot knocked the other down, the crowd of spectators pressed against a chain-link cage enclosing the ring and screamed with glee. Some tossed fake bills into the arena.
The scene felt ripped from a cyberpunk sci-fi novel but also showed the limitations of today’s technology. The fighters used their own software to stay upright and balance, but their kicks and punches were directed by human operators with remote controls.
First hires
Agility executives acknowledge the challenges of perfecting the humanoid form but say their robots are starting to become capable enough to find jobs in a key U.S. industry.
The e-commerce revolution has spawned sprawling warehouses across the country where products must be organized and customer orders assembled and shipped, but some human workers have said the repetitive work is low paid and leaves them prone to injury.
Agility rents out its robots to warehouse owners it says have struggled to keep their human jobs filled, including logistics company GXO, which uses them at a warehouse for Spanx shapewear in Flowery Branch, Georgia, northeast of Atlanta. The robots pick up baskets of clothing from wheeled robots and walk them over to conveyor belts that take them to other parts of the facility.
Agility Chief Business Officer Daniel Diez said facilities like this represent a first step for humanoid robots into gainful employment. “This work gets paid, and we have eyes on large-scale deployments just doing this, and that’s what we’re focused on,” he said.
German auto parts company Schaeffler uses Agility robots to load and unload equipment at a factory in Cheraw, South Carolina. Auto part plants have become a favored proving ground for humanoid robots, with Boston Dynamics, the company famous for its videos of back-flipping robots, doing tests with its majority owner, Hyundai. Foundation has said it also works with automakers but declined to identify them.
Despite those pilots, some industry veterans say it’s still unclear if bipedal machines can work reliably and safely in the real world.
“The dexterity of these robots isn’t fantastic. There are hardware limitations, software limitations. There are definitely safety concerns,” said Scott LaValley, founder of Cartwheel Robotics, who has worked on robots for both Boston Dynamics and Disney, including a Baby Groot robot modeled on the character from “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
Industrial equipment and robots generally have an emergency stop button, but most humanoid robots must, like humans, constantly expend energy to stay balanced on two legs. Cut the power and a bipedal robot generally crumples to the ground, potentially harming objects or people nearby.
LaValley, whose company is designing a child-sized robot meant to interact socially with people, says humanoids will succeed first not as physical laborers — the use case drawing the most industry excitement — but as companions.
Aaron Prather, director of robotics and autonomous systems programs at ASTM International, a safety standard-setting organization, said the fact that humanoid robots appear more relatable could worsen the risks of premature deployment.
“When we see humanoids, we think they are more capable, so we let our guards down that they’re just safe, they look like us, they’re going to act like us, and that is a double-edged sword,” he said. “I really am fearful somebody is going to do something stupid and someone is going to get hurt.”
Many roboticists argue the humanoid body plan just doesn’t make sense in many workplaces. The form factor might work for certain uses, such as taking care of children or older people, to provide artificial caregivers with a familiar shape, said Leo Ma, CEO of RoboForce.
His company’s robot Titan has two arms and a base with four wheels, providing stability and making it possible to lift more weight than a bipedal robot. Humanoid designs make sense “if it is so important to justify the trade-off and sacrifice of other things,” Ma said. “Other than that, there is a great invention called wheels.”
Home help
In June, at the Palo Alto, California, headquarters of start-up 1X, one of the company’s humanoid robots watered the office plants.
The company’s Neo robots are clothed in soft gray fabric reminiscent of a jump suit, and their lightweight limbs are designed to reduce the potential damage to a robot or people around it should one fall.
1X is testing Neo, named after Keanu Reeves’s character in “The Matrix,” in a handful of homes, including that of CEO Bernt Børnich. He foresees a future in which humanoid robots provide care to older people and companionship for everyone.
“I don’t think it’s another person, and it’s not a pet — it’s something else,” Børnich said. He is consistently surprised by how quickly visitors to his Silicon Valley home get used to the robot roaming the premises, he said, as it serves drinks and does household chores.
For the first 30 minutes or so, people are a little careful around the robot, finding it “really cool” but also “a bit scary,” Børnich said. Another half-hour later, “we’re just sitting there and drinking a cup of tea and talking — and everyone’s forgotten about the robot,” he said.
The catch is that Neo depends on teleoperation by 1X employees using hand controllers and VR headsets for many complex tasks, although it can operate autonomously for others. Tesla appeared to use a similar approach when its Optimus robot served drinks at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, last year, when the company unveiled its robotaxi design. The company did not return a request for comment.
Børnich said collecting data on how humans control the robot to perform different tasks in homes will help his company develop AI software that can make Neo truly autonomous. He compares his early testers with owners of Tesla vehicles whose data feeds the company’s development of automated driving.
Not all that data will be perfect because controlling a humanoid robot is complex. Neo spilled a lot of liquid on the ground while watering the plants. Neo can do some simple tasks autonomously, like opening the door to greet a guest, 1X said — but for now, more complex operations, like opening a refrigerator to grab a drink and then deliver it to a person, require some human control.
“It’s very easy to look at a robot and personify it so it has the same capabilities as a person,” said Matt Wicks, vice president and general manager of robotics automation at Zebra Technologies, which makes mobile wheeled robots that are used in warehouse facilities. “But the truth is we’re not really there.”