Humanoid robots are being sold as AI's next wave: Tesla's Optimus is pitched as a future product that could take on almost all human labor at roughly $20,000 per unit, with Elon Musk predicting public sales by the end of 2027, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Marc Andreessen and Morgan Stanley offering similarly bullish forecasts. Many robotics researchers are skeptical, arguing that methods which worked for language and images understate the difficulty of the physical world, where tasks vary endlessly and training data cannot cover every possibility. The article highlights vision-language-action models such as Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics running on the ALOHA 2 platform, which can perform relatively complex tasks like packing a lunchbox or doing origami but is likely to fail outside its training set; world models are presented as a possible alternative path, attracting backing for startups like World Labs and AMI Labs.

Tesla·Optimus·Google DeepMind·+5