Humanoid robots take center stage at Silicon Valley summit, but
skepticism remains
[December 30, 2025] By
MATT O'BRIEN
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Robots have long been seen as a bad bet for
Silicon Valley investors — too complicated, capital-intensive and
“boring, honestly,” says venture capitalist Modar Alaoui.
But the commercial boom in artificial intelligence has lit a spark under
long-simmering visions to build humanoid robots that can move their
mechanical bodies like humans and do things that people do.
Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, gathered more than 2,000 people
this week, including top robotics engineers from Disney, Google and
dozens of startups, to showcase their technology and debate what it will
take to accelerate a nascent industry.
Alaoui says many researchers now believe humanoids or some other kind of
physical embodiment of AI are “going to become the norm."
“The question is really just how long it will take,” he said.
Disney's contribution to the field, a walking robotic version of
“Frozen” character Olaf, will be roaming on its own through Disneyland
theme parks in Hong Kong and Paris early next year. Entertaining and
highly complex robots that resemble a human — or a snowman — are already
here, but the timeline for “general purpose” robots that are a
productive member of a workplace or household is farther away.
Even at a conference designed to build enthusiasm for the technology,
held at a Computer History Museum that's a temple to Silicon Valley's
previous breakthroughs, skepticism remained high that truly humanlike
robots will take root anytime soon.
“The humanoid space has a very, very big hill to climb,” said Cosima du
Pasquier, co-founder of Haptica Robotics, which works to give robots a
sense of touch. “There's a lot of research that still needs to be
solved.”
The Stanford University postdoctoral researcher came to the conference
in Mountain View, California, just a week after incorporating her
startup.
“The first customers are really the people here,” she said.
Researchers at the consultancy McKinsey & Company have counted about 50
companies around the world that have raised at least $100 million to
develop humanoids, led by about 20 in China and 15 in North America.
China is leading in part due to government incentives for component
production and robot adoption and a mandate last year “to have a
humanoid ecosystem established by 2025,” said McKinsey partner Ani
Kelkar. Displays by Chinese firms dominated the expo section of this
week's summit, held Thursday and Friday. The conference's most prevalent
humanoids were those made by China's Unitree, in part because
researchers in the U.S. buy the relatively cheap model to test their own
software.
In the U.S., the advent of generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT
and Google's Gemini has jolted the decades-old robotics industry in
different ways. Investor excitement has poured money into ambitious
startups aiming to build hardware that will bring a physical presence to
the latest AI.
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 But it's not just crossover hype —
the same technical advances that made AI chatbots so good at
language have played a role in teaching robots how to get better at
performing tasks. Paired with computer vision, robots powered by
“visual-language” models are trained to learn about their
surroundings.
One of the most prominent skeptics is robotics
pioneer Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of Roomba vacuum maker iRobot
who wrote in September that “today’s humanoid robots will not learn
how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps
many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech
companies to pay for their training.” Brooks didn't attend but his
essay was frequently mentioned.
Also missing was anyone speaking for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s
development of a humanoid called Optimus, a project that the
billionaire is designing to be “extremely capable” and sold in high
volumes. Musk said three years ago that people can probably buy an
Optimus “within three to five years.”
The conference's organizer, Alaoui, founder and general partner of
ALM Ventures, previously worked on driver attention systems for the
automotive industry and sees parallels between humanoids and the
early years of self-driving cars.
Near the entrance to the summit venue, just blocks from Google's
headquarters, is a museum exhibit showing Google's bubble-shaped
2014 prototype of a self-driving car. Eleven years later, robotaxis
operated by Google affiliate Waymo are constantly plying the streets
nearby.
Some robots with human elements are already being tested in
workplaces. Oregon-based Agility Robotics announced shortly before
the conference that it is bringing its tote-carrying warehouse robot
Digit to a Texas distribution facility run by Mercado Libre, the
Latin American e-commerce giant. Much like the Olaf robot, it has
inverted legs that are more birdlike than human.
Industrial robots performing single tasks are already commonplace in
car assembly and other manufacturing. They work with a level of
speed and precision that’s difficult for today’s humanoids — or
humans themselves — to match.
The head of a robotics trade group founded in 1974 is now lobbying
the U.S. government to develop a stronger national strategy to
advance the development of homegrown robots, be they humanoids or
otherwise.
“We have a lot of strong technology, we have the AI expertise here
in the U.S.,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for
Advancing Automation, after touring the expo. “So I think it remains
to be seen who is the ultimate leader in this. But right now, China
has certainly a lot more momentum on humanoids.”
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Associated Press journalist Terry Chea contributed to this report.
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