At a Silicon Valley summit, small robots roamed and poured lattes, while evangelists hailed new AI techniques as transformative. But full-size prototypes were scarce.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-19/humanoid-robots-are-emerging-as-the-next-big-ai-breakthrough
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*Tim Fernholz for Bloomberg News*
The packed crowd at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum was buzzing with anticipation: Has the moment arrived when robotics breaks out of the factory and into our daily lives, creating a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars?
Almost 100 years after the *Maschinenmensch* appeared in Fritz Lang’s *Metropolis*, robots are still mostly toys or tools built to perform repetitive tasks on manufacturing lines or in distribution centers. The concept of human-style robots in our homes and offices remains primarily the preserve of science fiction. But as large language models like ChatGPT promise a kind of general computer interface — it can code! It can write songs! It can make movies! — the hot idea in robotics is using those same tools to build a robot that can take on any task.
Robots designed to solve human problems will have to exist in human spaces, so it follows that designers feel they should probably look a little like a human, too. In recent years, a wave of startups — Figure AI, 1X, Agility Robotics, Galbot, Physical Intelligence, Field AI, Weave, Skild AI, just to name a few — have raised billions of dollars to try and make these machines a reality.
And yet at December’s Humanoids Summit, the third iteration of a conference focused on robots that look like people, full-size human lookalikes were scarce. From a safety and reliability standpoint, many models just aren’t ready for prime time: A fall might be embarrassing, but it could also injure a bystander.
[Read the full story here.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-19/humanoid-robots-are-emerging-as-the-next-big-ai-breakthrough?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2NjIzNjQ5MiwiZXhwIjoxNzY2ODQxMjkyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUN0lKV0JLSUpIOEowMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.ky0JTsRXmuDowS1Ch_vS7DrAQ2T-Na5K3gc-xNuI-EA)
We will have massive unemployment from AI but also be buying robots to perform frivolous household chores with all the money we don’t have from being unemployed. Got it. This all makes sense and seems fine.
What’s the benefit of a humanoid robot? If i were buying or making one, wouldn’t it be better to be built
in a shape that makes the task easy, efficient, and lets the robot work without breaking easily?