Robots have long been seen as a bad bet for Silicon Valley investors – too complicated, capital-intensive and “boring, honestly”, says venture capitalist Modar Alaoui.
But the commercial boom in artificial intelligence has lit a spark under long-simmering visions to build humanoid robots that can move their mechanical bodies like humans and do things that people do.
Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, gathered more than 2000 people this week, including top robotics engineers from Disney, Google and dozens of startups, to showcase their technology and debate what it would take to accelerate a nascent industry.
Alaoui said many researchers believed humanoids or some other kind of physical embodiment of AI were “going to become the norm".
“The question is really just how long it will take,” he said.
Disney's contribution to the field, a walking robotic version of Frozen character Olaf, would be roaming on its own through Disneyland theme parks in Hong Kong and Paris in early 2026. Entertaining and highly complex robots that resembled humans — or a snowman — were already here, but the timeline for “general purpose” robots that were productive members of a workplace or household was farther away.
Even at a conference designed to build enthusiasm for the technology, held at a Computer History Museum that was a temple to Silicon Valley's previous breakthroughs, scepticism remained high that truly humanlike robots would take root anytime soon.
“The humanoid space has a very, very big hill to climb,” said Cosima du Pasquier, founder and CEO of Haptica Robotics, which has worked to give robots a sense of touch. “There's a lot of research that still needs to be solved.”
The Stanford University postdoctoral researcher came to the conference in Mountain View, California, just a week after incorporating her startup.
“The first customers are really the people here,” she said.
Researchers at the consultancy McKinsey & Company have counted about 50 companies around the world that have raised at least US$100 million (NZ$172 million) to develop humanoids, led by about 20 in China and 15 in North America.
China was leading in part due to government incentives for component production and robot adoption and a mandate last year “to have a humanoid ecosystem established by 2025”, said McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar. Displays by Chinese firms dominated the expo section of the week's summit, held Thursday and Friday (local time). The conference's most prevalent humanoids were those made by China's Unitree, in part because researchers in the US bought the relatively cheap model to test their own software.
In the US, the advent of generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini has jolted the decades-old robotics industry in different ways. Investor excitement has poured money into ambitious startups aiming to build hardware that could have brought a physical presence to the latest AI.
But it's not just crossover hype – the same technical advances that made AI chatbots so good at language have played a role in teaching robots how to get better at performing tasks. Paired with computer vision, robots powered by “visual-language” models were trained to learn about their surroundings.
One of the most prominent sceptics was robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of Roomba vacuum maker iRobot who wrote in September that “today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training”. Brooks didn't attend but his essay was frequently mentioned.
Also missing was anyone speaking for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s development of a humanoid called Optimus, a project that the billionaire was designing to be “extremely capable” and sold in high volumes. Musk said three years ago that people can probably buy an Optimus “within three to five years”.
The conference's organiser, Alaoui, founder and general partner of ALM Ventures, previously worked on driver attention systems for the automotive industry and saw parallels between humanoids and the early years of self-driving cars.
Near the entrance to the summit venue, just blocks from Google's headquarters, was a museum exhibit showing Google's bubble-shaped 2014 prototype of a self-driving car. Eleven years later, robotaxis operated by Google affiliate Waymo are constantly plying the streets nearby.
Some robots with human elements were already being tested in workplaces. Oregon-based Agility Robotics announced shortly before the conference that it was bringing its tote-carrying warehouse robot Digit to a Texas distribution facility run by Mercado Libre, the Latin American e-commerce giant. Much like the Olaf robot, it had inverted legs that are more birdlike than human.
Industrial robots performing single tasks were already commonplace in car assembly and other manufacturing. They work with a level of speed and precision that was difficult for today’s humanoids – or humans themselves – to match.
The head of a robotics trade group founded in 1974 was lobbying the US government to develop a stronger national strategy to advance the development of homegrown robots, be they humanoids or otherwise.
“We have a lot of strong technology, we have the AI expertise here in the US,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, after touring the expo. “So I think it remains to be seen who is the ultimate leader in this. But right now, China has certainly a lot more momentum on humanoids.”
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