Mountain View, California – Robots have long been considered a bad bet for Silicon Valley investors: they're too complex, capital-intensive and “frankly, boring,” says venture capitalist Modar Alaoui.
But the commercial artificial intelligence boom ignited a spark in long-simmering dreams of creating humanoid robots that could move their mechanical bodies like humans and do what humans do.
Alaoui, the founder of the Humanoids Summit, brought together more than 2,000 people this week, including top robotics engineers from Disney, Google and dozens of startups, to showcase their technology and discuss what it will take to accelerate the nascent industry.
Alaoui says many researchers now believe that humanoids or some other physical embodiment of AI “will become the norm.”
“The question is how long will it take,” he said.
Disney's contribution to the field, a walking robotic version of Frozen character Olaf, will move independently around Disneyland theme parks in Hong Kong and Paris early next year. Entertaining and highly complex robots that resemble humans or snowmen are already here, but the time for creating “general purpose” robots that will be productive members of the workplace or household is even further away.
Even at a conference designed to drum up enthusiasm for the technology, held at the Computer History Museum, a shrine to previous Silicon Valley breakthroughs, skepticism remained high that truly humanoid robots would take root anytime soon.
“In humanoid space, there's a very, very big hill to climb,” said Cosima du Pasquier, founder and CEO of Haptica Robotics, which is working to give robots a sense of touch. “There are a lot of studies that still need to be addressed.”
The Stanford University postdoctoral fellow attended a conference in Mountain View, California, just a week after registering her startup.
“The first customers are really people,” she said.
Researchers at the consulting company McKinsey & The company counts about 50 companies around the world that have raised at least $100 million to develop humanoids, including about 20 in China and 15 in North America.
China is leading in part thanks to government incentives to produce components and deploy robots, as well as last year's mandate to “create a humanoid ecosystem by 2025,” said McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar. Exhibitions from Chinese firms dominated the exhibition section of this week's summit, held on Thursday and Friday.
In the US, the emergence of generative AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini has shaken up the decades-old robotics industry in different ways. Investor excitement has poured money into ambitious startups seeking to create hardware that will provide a physical presence for the latest artificial intelligence.
But it's not just crossover hype—the same technological advances that make AI chatbots so proficient in language have played a role in teaching robots how to better perform tasks. Combined with computer vision, robots running on “visual language” models are trained to learn about their surroundings.
One of the most prominent skeptics is robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks, co-founder of Roomba vacuum cleaner maker iRobot, who wrote in September that “today's humanoid robots will not learn to be dexterous, despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions, of dollars donated by venture capitalists and big tech companies to pay for their training.” Brooks was not present, but his essay was mentioned frequently.
There was also no one to speak out in support of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's development of a humanoid called Optimus, a project the billionaire is projecting to be “extremely capable” and sell in high volumes. Musk said three years ago that people would likely be able to buy Optimus “within three to five years.”
Conference organizer Alaoui, founder and general partner of ALM Ventures, previously worked on driver attention systems for the auto industry and sees parallels between humanoids and the early years of self-driving cars.
Near the entrance to the summit site, just a few blocks from Google's headquarters, is a museum exhibit showcasing Google's bubble-shaped self-driving car prototype created in 2014. Eleven years later, self-driving cars full of passengers operated by Google subsidiary Waymo are constantly cruising the streets nearby.
Some robots with human elements are already being tested in workplaces. Just before the conference, Oregon-based Agility Robotics announced it was delivering its warehouse robot Digit to a distribution center in Texas operated by Mercado Libre, a Latin American e-commerce giant. Like Olaf the robot, he has upside-down legs that look more like a bird's than a human's.
Industrial robots that perform specific tasks are already commonplace in automobile assembly and other industries. They operate with a level of speed and precision that today's humanoids (and humans themselves) find difficult to match.
The head of a robotics trade group founded in 1974 is now lobbying the U.S. government to develop a stronger national strategy to promote the development of domestic robots, humanoid or otherwise.
“We have a lot of powerful technologies, we have expertise in artificial intelligence here in the United States,” said Jeff Bernstein, president of the Association for the Advancement of Automation, after visiting the show Thursday. “So I think it remains to be seen who the definitive leader is on this issue. But China certainly has a lot more momentum on humanoids right now.”
