Robots have long been seen as a bad bet for Silicon Valley investors \u2014 too complicated, capital-intensive and \u201cboring, honestly,\u201d says venture capitalist Modar Alaoui.<\/p>\n
But the commercial\u00a0boom in artificial intelligence<\/a>\u00a0has lit a spark under long-simmering\u00a0visions to build humanoid<\/a>\u00a0robots that can move their mechanical bodies like humans and do things that people do.<\/p>\n Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, gathered more than 2,000 people this week, including top robotics engineers from Disney<\/a>, Google<\/a> and dozens of startups, to showcase their technology and debate what it will take to accelerate a nascent industry.<\/p>\n Alaoui says many researchers now believe humanoids or some other kind of physical embodiment of AI are \u201cgoing to become the norm.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe question is really just how long it will take,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Disney\u2019s contribution to the field, a walking robotic version of \u201cFrozen\u201d character Olaf, will be roaming on its own through Disneyland theme parks in Hong Kong and Paris early next year. Entertaining and highly complex robots that resemble a human \u2014 or a snowman \u2014 are already here, but the timeline for \u201cgeneral purpose\u201d robots that are a productive member of a workplace or household is farther away.<\/p>\n Even at a conference designed to build enthusiasm for the technology, held at a Computer History Museum that\u2019s a temple to Silicon Valley\u2019s previous breakthroughs, skepticism remained high that truly humanlike robots will take root anytime soon.<\/p>\n \u201cThe humanoid space has a very, very big hill to climb,\u201d said Cosima du Pasquier, co-founder of Haptica Robotics, which works to give robots a sense of touch. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of research that still needs to be solved.\u201d<\/p>\n The Stanford University postdoctoral researcher came to the conference in Mountain View, California, just a week after incorporating her startup.<\/p>\n \u201cThe first customers are really the people here,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Researchers at the consultancy McKinsey<\/a> & Company have counted about 50 companies around the world that have raised at least $100 million to develop humanoids, led by about 20 in China and 15 in North America.<\/p>\n China is leading in part due to government incentives for component production and robot adoption and a mandate last year \u201cto have a humanoid ecosystem established by 2025,\u201d said McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar. Displays by Chinese firms dominated the expo section of this week\u2019s summit, held Thursday and Friday. The conference\u2019s most prevalent humanoids were those made by China\u2019s Unitree, in part because researchers in the U.S. buy the relatively cheap model to test their own software.<\/p>\n In the U.S., the advent of generative AI chatbots like OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Google\u2019s Gemini has jolted the decades-old robotics industry in different ways. Investor<\/a> excitement has poured money into ambitious startups aiming to build hardware that will bring a physical presence to the latest AI.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not just crossover hype \u2014 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 \u201cvisual-language\u201d models are trained to learn about their surroundings.<\/p>\n One of the most prominent skeptics is robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of Roomba vacuum maker iRobot who wrote in September that \u201ctoday\u2019s 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.\u201d Brooks didn\u2019t attend but his essay was frequently mentioned.<\/p>\n