The machines can jump, dance and go viral, but turning them into useful workers remains far more difficult — and expensive — than their boosters suggest.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-08/humanoid-robots-aren-t-as-advanced-as-the-ai-hype-cycle-suggests
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*Peter Guest for Bloomberg News*
The human hand is a miracle of hardware and software. “It’s got multiple kinds of grasp in it. It can handle a variety of objects just exquisitely,” Nicolaus Radford says, running his palm down his cheek and curling his fingers into his beard. “It’s incredibly sensate; it feels really well.” Despite having practically no muscles — just tendons connecting the ends of the fingers to fibers in the arm — “it’s so delicate that you can put a Swiss watch together, and you can also swing a mallet.”
“The hand,” Radford says, “is hypercompetitive.”
Radford is the chief executive officer of Persona AI, Inc. a startup based in Houston that’s trying to make a fully functional humanoid robot that can be deployed to shipyards, construction sites and energy infrastructure to do jobs real humans can’t or won’t do. The ultimate goal, he says, is to run a robot staffing agency, renting out machines to employers worldwide. “Works like a machine,” one slogan on Persona’s website reads. “Performs like a teammate.”
Building a walking, thinking humanoid is a challenge that’s captivated generations of engineers, but advances in artificial intelligence and sensor technology have led some in the tech sector to believe that a working model is finally within reach. On social media, videos of anthropoid machines from Chinese manufacturer Unitree Robotics marching and performing acrobatics have gone viral; Elon Musk has diverted some of Tesla’s manufacturing capacity away from vehicles to focus on its Optimus robots, predicting there will one day be more humanoid robots on the planet than people.
[Read the full story here.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-08/humanoid-robots-aren-t-as-advanced-as-the-ai-hype-cycle-suggests?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc3ODI1ODM1MiwiZXhwIjoxNzc4ODYzMTUyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJURVBGQ0FLR0NUSjYwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.GuAN6CM0Ww1DjoGgDq2feCWj2ruBdecSk9CP4MEWhLw)
the hype cycle framing is right but the timeline question is where it gets interesting the gap between impressive demo and reliable enough to deploy in a real warehouse is where every previous robotics wave stalled the companies that will actually matter are the ones solving the boring problems like maintenance uptime and what happens when the robot breaks not the ones with the best bipedal walking video
How many phases are there before this shitshow stops???
Making human shaped is dumb.
Design them purely to serve their function
Can we take a second to acknowledge that building robots to be humanoid is stupid.
We didn’t build cars to be more horse-like, we built them to be cars with wheels so they can do that job best.
Even in a sci Fi movie like Star Wars, how often are humanoid robots actually a thing? The robots that were designed for combat and work were not humanoid at all.
I wonder for who. Most people won’t want or have money to spend on it. Unless you make those robots sex workers. Then you will have a bunch of single guys buying them.
CAVEMAN BRAIN TELL ME SMASH. SMASH METAL MAN. UNHOLY. BAD. I DONT UNDERSTAND. I MUST BREAK WITH CLUB
-This is literally how my brain feels when I see a humanoid robot.
They’re coming for the oldest profession.
https://youtu.be/SOGpGocW5UA
I will say…it is funny, and sad, to see such a push for humanoid robots, and humanoid robots with sentience when we still kill and abuse and exploit the already sentient human population based on factors they cannot control.
honestly humanoid robots do feel like the natural next “AI demo” after chatbots
I literally just finished destroying the institute on Fo4 about 20 min ago. Lol.
For a deep dive on the problems with humanoid robots.
https://youtu.be/DRn3-MN92H4?si=1ttR2PvlLX60ua53
Let’s see a washing and clothes folding robot. You’ll see how insanely far away we are. And don’t show me some demo, put some baby and woman’s clothes in there.
It’s really important to understand that the stock market is not the economy but rather a hyperreal abstraction of it, the robots don’t ever need to make a cent of profit for the stock price to 10X, they only need to appear imminently successful in order to become a Symbol of profit.
The overlord tech bros that want this just want a child sized fk bot and it’s dementedly evil.