For a long time, Silicon Valley investors have viewed robots as a risky bet—overly complex, capital-intensive, and “honestly, boring,” according to venture capitalist Modar Alaoui.
But commercial advancements have ignited interest in long-gestating robots that can move their mechanical bodies like humans and perform human-like tasks.
Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, brought together more than 2,000 attendees this week—including top robotics engineers from leading firms and dozens of startups—to showcase their technologies and debate what’s needed to accelerate this emerging industry.
Alaoui notes many researchers now believe humanoids or other physical forms of AI “will become the norm.”
“The real question is just how long it will take,” he stated.
Disney’s contribution to the field—a walking robotic version of “Frozen” character Olaf—will autonomously roam Disneyland parks in Hong Kong and Paris early next year. Entertaining, highly complex robots resembling humans (or snowmen) already exist, but the timeline for “general purpose” robots that are productive in workplaces or homes remains distant.
Even at a conference designed to boost enthusiasm for the technology—held at the Computer History Museum, a tribute to Silicon Valley’s past breakthroughs—skepticism stayed high that truly human-like robots will take hold anytime soon.
“The humanoid space has an enormous hill to climb,” said Cosima du Pasquier, co-founder of Haptica Robotics, which focuses on giving robots a sense of touch. “There’s a lot of research still needing to be solved.”
The Stanford University postdoctoral researcher attended the Mountain View, California, conference just a week after launching her startup.
“The first customers are really the people here,” she explained.
Researchers at consultancy firm & Company have counted around 50 global companies that have raised at least $100 million to develop humanoids, led by about 20 in China and 15 in North America.
China leads in part due to government incentives for component production and robot adoption, plus a 2024 mandate “to establish a humanoid ecosystem by 2025,” said McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar. Chinese firms’ displays dominated the expo section of this week’s summit (held Thursday and Friday). The most common humanoids at the conference were from China’s Unitree, partly because U.S. researchers buy its relatively cheap model to test their own software.
In the U.S., the rise of generative AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini has jolted the decades-old robotics industry in various ways. Investor excitement has poured money into ambitious startups aiming to build hardware that gives the latest AI a physical presence.
But it’s not just crossover hype—the same technical advances that made AI chatbots proficient at language have helped robots improve task performance. Paired with computer vision, robots powered by “visual-language” models learn about their surroundings.
One prominent skeptic is robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks, co-founder of Roomba maker iRobot, who wrote in September: “Today’s humanoid robots will not learn dexterity despite hundreds of millions (or billions) of dollars from VCs and major tech firms funding their training.” Brooks didn’t attend, but his essay was frequently referenced.
Also missing was any representative discussing CEO Elon Musk’s Optimus humanoid project—designed to be “extremely capable” and mass-produced. Musk said three years ago people could likely buy an Optimus “within three to five years.”
Summit 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 early self-driving cars.
Near the summit venue’s entrance—blocks from Google’s headquarters—a museum exhibit shows Google’s 2014 bubble-shaped self-driving car prototype. Eleven years later, Waymo robotaxis (Google’s affiliate) constantly ply nearby streets.
Some robots with human features are already tested in workplaces. Oregon-based Agility Robotics announced shortly before the conference it would bring its tote-carrying warehouse robot Digit to a Texas distribution facility run by Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre. Like Olaf, it has inverted legs more birdlike than human.
Single-task industrial robots are common in car assembly and manufacturing. Their speed and precision are hard for today’s humanoids (or even humans) to match.
The head of a 1974-founded robotics trade group is now lobbying the U.S. government to create a stronger national strategy for homegrown robots—humanoid or otherwise.
“We have strong technology and AI expertise here in the U.S.,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, after touring the expo. “So who the ultimate leader will be remains to be seen. But right now, China has far more momentum in humanoids.”