Companies like Boston Dynamics, Honda, Sony and others have wowed the public with early versions of these robots.

Why would we want humanoids?

The prevailing sort of answer has been the world is built to be occupied by humans.

So we want robots that are versatile, that can do a wide range of things.

And having it adopt the humanoid form factor always made a lot of sense.

Recent leaps in artificial intelligence have resulted in leaps for robotics.

The data that they use to train these robots, it's based in real world scenarios.

Now a robot can be trained the same way a human is.

We have this technology called teleoperation.

The person does the thing 200 times.

We record all that data and then we use that data to train these models.

And the AI models are very similar to the GPT style generative AI models.

You feed in the 200 trajectories and the system learns how the task is being done.

And then the robot will do the task autonomously.

If I go into a new space, I'm now not looking at spending months trying to code that problem.

I can potentially just generate it straight out of gen AI and be able to have Digit interact with new objects and in new environments without having to develop at all.

AI models require massive quantities of data to train off of, and this is no different.

If you show the robot enough things, it starts to be able to do things that it hasn't been shown before.

Big tech is very interested in the big potential this technology promises.

If you're gonna do AI at the frontier, you need to be partnered with Microsoft or NVIDIA or Google or one of the big players.

This is no other way.

They have resources that nobody else has, even governments.

NVIDIA's been a great partner up until this point.

We're using everything from their hardware to their simulation, and then recently have started working with them on foundation models as well.

One of this industry's biggest proponents is Elon Musk.

He's made some bold predictions that Tesla's robot, Optimus, could propel it to a $25 trillion market cap and that it will amount to a majority of Tesla's long-term value with demand as high as 10 to 20 billion units.

Tesla is arguably the world's biggest robotics company because our cars are like semi-sentient robots on wheels.

And with the full self-driving computer and all the neural nets, it kind of makes sense to put that onto a humanoid form.

And it's intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate through a world built for humans and eliminate dangerous, repetitive, and boring tasks.

Digit, created by Oregon-based Agility Robotics, is helping Amazon in early-stage testing at its Sumner Washington Fulfillment Center and Innovation Lab.

We've been working with them recycling totes.

The arms are capable of handling a wide variety of different payloads, up to about 33-ish pounds.

We envision an app store for robots out in the future where if you need a tote recycling app, you can go into the app store and download that onto your robot.

And according to the company, there is plenty of demand.

Agility is building a factory in Salem, Oregon to keep up with orders.

We call it Robofab.

We'll be online this summer.

In a few years, have a capacity of about 10,000 robots per year.

And where will those go for the most part?

To many, many customers, but largely initially in the logistics, warehousing space.

The next big market we see is automotive, retail, and then eventually into markets like healthcare.

Several other startups are developing similar humanoid robots.

Sanctuary AI, launched in 2018 in Vancouver, Canada, unveiled its latest robot last year.

Phoenix, a five-foot-seven robot capable of lifting up to 55 pounds.

It looks a bit different from other humanoid designs trading its legs for wheels.

Robots with legs.

The upper body, including the hands, have to be very weak and light.

So instead of doing that, we put our product on a wheel base.

And because we made that trade-off, we can build very powerful, very precise, very fast motors in the upper body.

The company deployed early iterations of its robot with Canadian Tire, completing front and back of store tasks such as picking and packing merchandise.

Robots were asked to do everything from greeting people when they come through the door to actually putting things on trucks.

What would you tell those people who, you know, there are certain jobs that might be lost as a result of this?

Actually, we've heard from some of those people and what their jobs start to evolve into is the manager of the robot fleet.

There are just some jobs that people don't want.

Proponents say a humanoid can help fill those.

There's about 10 million open jobs in the United States alone.

We could build and maintain 10 million of the robots that we're talking about without touching a single job.

If you have to lift sort of 55 pounds somewhere between 50 and 100 times an hour, that's a serious workout.

So we're taking these dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs first.

How far away are we from Digit doing your laundry?

That's probably more along the lines of, you know, a decade or more.

And Kate Rooney joins us now.

Kate, that story looked less like a news story and more like the beginning of, I don't know, like a Hollywood movie.

I have so many thoughts, but first off, let's talk about China real quick, because there are some videos like this that I keep seeing that come out of the World AI Conference in Shanghai, and then I'm like, actually, just take a look at this.

I mean, I don't, that doesn't look like a great idea, but it shows what they're capable of.

What is China showing us?

It's interesting, Gadi.

So China really is leading the race, essentially by a mile.

So it's kind of ironic in some ways because the U.S. was an early leader.

A lot of the innovation early on came out of the U.S., but China right now at this point is the largest installer of industrial robots.

It accounts for about half of the global total at this point, according to at least one report.

One benefit that they've had, and one reason they've been able to pull forward is because it's cheaper.

It's a lot cheaper to manufacture there.

So they're closer to factories.

They can produce at much lower cost.

So it's kind of similar in terms of what you see in electric vehicles, for example, in the same dynamic where they've really been able to do this at a much lower cost so they can spread this out, sell these more easily, and that's really the big dynamic.

Cost is the big takeaway for China.

They've also taken a sort of different path on design.

If you looked at some of the videos, they have done a lot more of this realistic facial features.

They've just gone in a totally different direction than a lot of the U.S. companies, which have gone with sort of just the faceless robot, but in China, people are a lot more comfortable with more lifelike interactions, and it really is subjective.

It depends on who you ask.

Some people say it's creepy, reminds them of Westworld, but they seem a lot more comfortable with that, and that's kind of the direction they're going in China.

Yeah, no uncanny valley there, I guess.

It does seem like Tesla is standing its ground, though, showing off Optimus 2.0, if I saw that right.

What's the promise of Optimus there?

Yeah, so Elon Musk has really gone all in on this.

In a lot of ways, it makes sense because Tesla, as he's described it, is sort of a robotics company, and these cars, as he's described them, are sentient robots on wheels, so the leap from making a car like a Tesla to a humanoid robot, at least in the mind of Musk, it's not a far jump, and so he thinks that this is gonna push Tesla to a $25 trillion market cap, at least according to Elon Musk.

He thinks the majority of the company's long-term value is gonna come from these robots, so he is really going all in on this.

There are skeptics out there, of course.

There are people that doubt Elon Musk.

He's known for these really bold ideas, but a lot of people that also wouldn't bet against him.

Yeah, it's all fun and games until you go from riding in a Tesla to, I don't know, your kids riding on the back of an Optimus.

It seems like a very wild future.

I also saw that China has put together their first set of regulations on humanoids.

What do those look like?

It's so weird to talk about humanoids, but when it comes to humanoid legislation, what could it look like here in the United States?

It's gonna be tricky, Gadi.

So regulation, it's similar to what you see in AI.

There's really no international standards.

They've been looked at, but they haven't been agreed upon, and then in the US, a lot of these robots are being deployed in warehouses.

So organizations like OSHA are really the workplace safety groups that need to approve the deployment of these robots, make sure these aren't accidents.

I mean, these are powerful machines that could really do a lot of damage.

So they need to get approval here in the US, and they're already being rolled out.

Amazon is one of the biggest companies that's doing this.

They need to get the same approvals in the US that they would with any sort of industrial robotics approval.

So it's interesting.

There's some existing infrastructure, but on a global scale, there's no sort of agreement.

It's gonna be a bit of a mess, according to experts, in terms of how to get agreement on a global scale, but they also don't want the US to fall behind.

There's geopolitical implications.

I just can't stop watching this video and think OSHA's gonna be in charge of that.

I mean, we'll see.

Hopefully, we'll see a lot more when it comes to regulation and a little bit of thought-out regulation here in the United States.

But fascinating stuff all around.

Kate, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Thanks for watching.

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