For $20,000-or a $499 per month rental fee and a six-month commitment-the lanky robot can do simple tasks around the house, such as unloading the dishwasher and watering plants, and can answer your questions through its built-in large language model.
At the annual Spring Festival Gala, the Lunar New Year show in China, humanoid robots from Chinese startup Unitree Robotics flipped, lunged, and swung swords and nunchucks just feet from child performers in a tightly choreographed kung fu routine.
The broadcast, watched by nearly 600 million Chinese as they devour jiaozi (traditional Chinese dumplings) with their families, became a display of cuttingedge innovation at a time of growing technological rivalry with the United States. There was a bit of everything: from a comic sketch featuring hyperrealistic humanoid robots chatting with an elderly woman, meant to highlight the potential of artificial intelligence, to a kungfu performance that raises questions about what future warfare might look like.
Two dozen humanoid robots performed the world's first continuous freestyle table-vaulting parkour, the first aerial flip, continuous single-leg flips, a two-step wall-assisted backflip, and the first 7.5-rotation Airflare grand spin, CGTN reported. The performance marked a stark contrast with last year's show, when robots twirled handkerchiefs and performed simple movements. Four firms Unitree, Magiclab, Galbot, and Noetix partnered with the gala in deals reportedly worth about 100 million yuan ($14m), according to the South China Morning Post.
And while today's innovation is cutting-edge, the majority of today's humanoids are militant, aggressively masculine, and plain creepy-looking. Just look at what Tesla announced this week with its shift in strategy from producing EVs, to producing robots. Their Optimus general-purpose humanoid robot is a prime example of the physical design most of these robots share. They may be technically impressive, but they are not systems most people will feel comfortable sharing space with, let alone inviting into their homes.
Robots are coming for auto workers' jobs. Hyundai Motor revealed plans to use 30,000 humanoids across its factories by 2030. The announcement sent the company's shares rallying to record highs. But Hyundai's Korean labor union hit the brakes on the plan, warning in an internal letter that robots won't enter the workplace without union approval. The union said the robots would bring "employment shocks" to workers.
1X CEO Bernt Børnich told Business Insider that his startup's new " world model" would allow Neo to learn directly from video captured by the robot itself, rather than relying on data collected by human operators. "Essentially, the world model does the same thing as the operator would do," said Børnich, adding that he expected the update to improve Neo's ability to generalize and tackle tasks it has not encountered before.
As though exercising my corporeal form wasn't trial enough, now robots? Who in their right mind would want a walking, talking surveillance machine inside their home? The privacy invasion required for such robots to function goes far beyond your smart speaker listening into your conversations, your automatic pet feeder capturing footage, or your Roomba mapping the inside of your home and sharing it with Amazon.
Atlas can already dance and perform acrobatics but, like other humanoids, it lacks the intelligence needed to understand its environment, make complex decisions, and manipulate unfamiliar objects with its hands. That could start to change with the addition of an advanced AI model like Gemini, though it remains unclear how robots will match the adaptability and subtlety of human manual dexterity.
The robot, with a glowing circle for a face and a fully electric, battery-powered body, is so advanced that it will soon be working alongside human factory workers for parent company Hyundai, the companies claimed. Hyundai said it plans on mass-producing Atlas as "production-ready humanoid robots" that will be put to work at the automaker's car plants, starting with the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant in Savannah, Georgia. The company estimates it will produce 30,000 robots annually starting in 2028.
The global market for humanoid robots could be worth as much as $9 trillion by 2050, with China expected to dominate demand and basic household models potentially entering homes within the next five years, according to new research. A report by Royal Bank of Canada estimates that humanoid robots could become a core part of everyday life over the coming decades, transforming labour markets and household routines.
But what would happen if such a technology were to land in the hands of terrorists and criminals, who aren't beholden to the norms of modern warfare at all? In a new report, pan-European police agency Europol's Innovation Lab has imagined a not-so-distant future in which criminals could hijack autonomous vehicles, drones, and humanoid robots to sow chaos - and how law enforcement will have to step up as a result.
It's no longer science fiction, it's non-fiction and it's on display here in the Bay Area during the second annual Humanoids Summit in Mountain View. What started as an independent event last year, has grown to an international conference. Founder Modar Alaoui says it's bigger, better and with even more robots on display. "The entire ecosystem is moving at a very fast and rapid rate - in the data space, in the tele-op space," Alaoui said. "There's new categories, also, in the home."
"What looks hard is easy, but what looks easy is really hard," Stephanie Zhan, a partner at Sequoia Capital, explained, paraphrasing an observation from computer scientist Hans Moravec. In the late Eighties, Moravec and other computer scientists noted that it was easier for computers to perform well on tests of intelligence, yet failed at tasks that even young children could do.
In a video posted to Instagram, EngineAI CEO Zhao Tongyang geared up in leg, stomach, and head pads. Workers taunted him, asking if he was nervous. The company's T800 robot then appeared to kick Tongyang in the stomach, and he can be seen falling to the ground. "Too violent!" Tongyang said in a translation. "Too brutal!" The video featuring its CEO came after EngineAI posted a separate video of its humanoid robot doing kicks and flips.
After all, plenty of industrial robots use wheels to roll around a warehouse, or feature one large, strong, and multi-pivoting arm instead of relying onseveral weaker ones. Besides, the existing crop of humanoid robots is capable of a lot more than walking around and waving their hands. Look no further than a video shared by robot tinkerer and researcher Logan Olson last month, which shows how a humanoid robot can turn itself into a surprisingly creepy crawling machine while using the full extent of its four limbs' freedom of movement.
