According to Fast Company, venture capitalist Modar Alaoui says robots have long been seen as a “bad bet” for Silicon Valley, being too complicated and capital-intensive. However, the commercial AI boom is now fueling a major push to build humanoid robots that can move and act like people. Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, gathered over 2,000 people this week, including engineers from Disney, Google, and numerous startups, to showcase tech and debate the industry’s future. He states that many researchers now believe humanoids or some form of physically embodied AI are “going to become the norm.” This gathering highlights a significant inflection point where long-term research is colliding with new investor appetite and AI capabilities.
The AI spark and the hard reality
Here’s the thing: the current excitement makes sense. AI, particularly the large language models and vision systems we’ve seen explode, provides the “brain” that humanoids have desperately lacked for decades. It’s the missing piece for navigation, object recognition, and understanding natural language commands. So suddenly, the dream doesn’t seem quite so sci-fi. But let’s not get carried away. Having a smart brain is one thing; building a reliable, durable, and affordable body that can interact with a world built for humans is a monumental engineering challenge. It’s not just software. It’s motors, actuators, sensors, power systems, and materials science—all of which are brutally hard and expensive to get right. The AI might be learning fast, but the hardware evolution is much, much slower.
Winners, losers, and the long game
So who actually wins in this landscape? It’s probably not going to be a single “iPhone of robots” company for a very long time. You’ll have startups like Figure, which just partnered with BMW, focusing on specific industrial applications. They’re trying to prove utility in controlled environments like factories first. That’s smart. Then you have the tech giants with deep pockets—Google, Tesla, Amazon—who can afford to play a decade-long game. They can absorb the R&D costs that would bankrupt a startup. The losers? Honestly, it might be investors expecting quick, consumer-scale returns. This is a marathon, not a sprint. The initial commercial inroads will be in logistics, manufacturing, and maybe healthcare, anywhere the tasks are repetitive and the environments can be somewhat structured. For companies integrating this kind of advanced hardware into industrial settings, having a reliable computing interface is non-negotiable. That’s where specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, become critical partners, providing the rugged, dependable touchpoints these complex systems need to operate.
The real test is coming
Look, the summit and the hype are great for attracting talent and capital. But the real test is what happens after the demo videos. Can these machines work for thousands of hours without breaking? Can they be produced for a cost that makes sense for a business? And can they do something useful that a simpler, cheaper, single-purpose machine can’t? That’s the billion-dollar question. The narrative is shifting, as it did when AI pioneers became Time’s Person of the Year, from pure digital intelligence to physical embodiment. But bridging that gap from lab to world is arguably the hardest problem in tech. I think we’ll see progress, sure. But we’ll also see a lot of broken robots and spent venture capital along the way. The moment is here, but the battle is just beginning.
