Why, Robot?

 

[Early Optimus prototype]

When you factor in the pivotal role that Optimus plays in the weak bull case for Tesla, companies and divisions of companies developing bipedal humanoid robots primarily focused on the personal/household market are being valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, despite a questionable use case and an even more questionable basic design.

As far as I can tell, with all the coverage of these businesses, virtually no one is questioning the assumptions that must be true in order to justify this level of investment. Keeping in mind that, at best, a fifth of U.S. households have robotic vacuum cleaners—and a substantial portion own dishwashers but don't even bother to use them—what share of households in the U.S., let alone the world, are going to shell out thousands, probably tens of thousands of dollars for a robot butler? Given their top-heavy, unstable design, highly inefficient locomotion (compared to wheeled alternatives), and their expense and complexity, why should the humanoid form become the standard, despite offering little to no significant gains in functionality?

And finally, when you get past the fantastic claims and staged—if not outright faked—video demonstrations, how likely is it that these things will pay off soon enough to justify the money being poured into them? 

There are some notable similarities between this hype bubble and what we've seen around AI and large language models, but with one key difference: while they may prove to be something of a dead end in the long term, LLMs are, for the moment, arguably the best tools we have for natural language processing. Bipedal humanoid robots aren't really the best at anything.