But Rus and plenty of others I spoke with on the expo suggest that this hype just doesn’t add up.
Humanoids “are mostly not intelligent,” she said. Rus showed a video of herself talking to a sophisticated humanoid that easily followed her instruction to choose up a watering can and water a close-by plant. It was impressive. But when she asked it to “water” her friend, the robot didn’t consider that humans don’t need watering like plants and moved to douse the person. “These robots lack common sense,” she said.
I also spoke with Pras Velagapudi, the chief technology officer of Agility Robotics, who detailed physical limitations the corporate has to beat too. To be strong, a humanoid needs a number of power and a giant battery. The stronger you make it and the heavier it’s, the less time it could run without charging, and the more it is advisable worry about safety. A robot like this can also be complex to fabricate.
Some impressive humanoid demos don’t overcome these core constraints as much as they display other impressive features: nimble robotic hands, as an example, or the power to converse with people via a big language model. But these capabilities don’t necessarily translate well to the roles that humanoids are imagined to be taking up (it’s more useful to program a protracted list of detailed instructions for a robot to follow than to talk to it, for instance).
This will not be to say fleets of humanoids won’t ever join our workplaces, but slightly that the adoption of the technology will likely be drawn out, industry specific, and slow. It’s related to what I wrote about last week: To individuals who consider AI a “normal” technology, slightly than a utopian or dystopian one, this all is smart. The technology that succeeds in an isolated lab setting will appear very different from the one which gets commercially adopted at scale.
All of this sets the scene for what happened with certainly one of the largest names in robotics last week. Figure AI has raised an amazing amount of investment for its humanoids, and founder Brett Adcock claimed on X in March that the corporate was the “most sought-after private stock within the secondary market.” Its most publicized work is with BMW, and Adcock has shown videos of Figure’s robots working to maneuver parts for the automaker, saying that the partnership took just 12 months to launch. Adcock and Figure have generally not responded to media requests and don’t make the rounds at typical robot trade shows.
In April, published an article quoting a spokesperson from BMW, alleging that the pair’s partnership involves fewer robots at a smaller scale than Figure has implied. On April 25, Adcock posted on LinkedIn that “Figure’s litigation counsel will aggressively pursue all available legal remedies—including, but not limited to, defamation claims—to correct the publication’s blatant misstatements.” The creator of the article didn’t reply to my request for comment, and a representative for Adcock and Figure declined to say what parts of the article were inaccurate. The representative pointed me to Adcock’s statement, which lacks details.
