Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up call for investors funneling billions into humanoid robot startups: You’re wasting your money.
Brooks, who co-founded iRobot and spent decades at MIT, is particularly skeptical of companies like Tesla and the high-profile AI robotics company Figure trying to teach robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans doing tasks. In a new essay, he calls this approach “pure fantasy thinking.”
The problem? Human hands are incredibly sophisticated, packed with about 17,000 specialized touch receptors that no robot comes close to matching. While machine learning transformed speech recognition and image processing, those breakthroughs were built on decades of existing technology for capturing the right data. “We don’t have such a tradition for touch data,” Brooks points out.
Then there’s safety. Full-sized walking humanoid robots pump massive amounts of energy into staying upright. When they fall, they’re dangerous. Physics means a robot twice the size of today’s models would pack eight times the harmful energy.
Brooks predicts that in 15 years, successful “humanoid” robots will actually have wheels, multiple arms, and specialized sensors and abandon the human form. Meanwhile, he’s thoroughly convinced that today’s billions are funding expensive training experiments that will never scale to mass production.
It’s far from the first time Brooks has poured cold water on expectations set by brash entrepreneurs and eager investors. Last year, he talked at length with TechCrunch about why the promise of generative AI exceeds its abilities and can even create more work in some cases.
For example, the AI research nonprofit METR said this summer it had recruited 16 highly rated developers from large open source repositories to measure the impacts of AI tools on real-world software development. It then assigned them nearly 250 real issues to address with the tools and without them, and measured their screens. When the developers used the AI tools, they took 19% longer to complete their tasks. As interestingly, they perceived that the AI had sped them up by 20%.
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Brooks has also long argued that AI is not the existential threat that many, including Elon Musk, have posited that it is. TechCrunch talked with Brooks about this back in 2017 at MIT, when the landscape looked very different but not entirely dissimilar to today’s playing field.
At the time, Brooks said he was just starting to see more companies specializing in making datasets for machine learning — a trend that has only continued. Relatedly, he argued why it wasn’t necessarily a foregone conclusion that Big Tech companies would win in robotics, despite what long ago seemed an insurmountable lead in the amount of data they control. Yet today’s leading robotics companies have not escaped those companies’ gravitational pull.
Apptronik, a humanoid robot maker that has raised nearly $450 million from investors, counts Google among its backers and partnered with Google’s DeepMind robotics team late last year to “bring together best-in-class artificial intelligence with cutting-edge hardware and embodied intelligence.”
Figure, similarly, is backed in part by Microsoft and OpenAI Startup Fund and partnered with OpenAI in February 2024 to combine OpenAI’s research with its own “deep understanding of robotics hardware and software.” The two split up almost exactly a year later, this past March, with FigureAI saying it had enjoyed a “major breakthrough” in its own in-house, end-to-end AI for robotics.
Earlier this month, Figure announced it had received over $1 billion in committed capital in its latest funding round and said the deal valued the company at an astonishing $39 billion.
Loizos has been reporting on Silicon Valley since the late ’90s, when she joined the original Red Herring magazine. Previously the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch, she was named Editor in Chief and General Manager of TechCrunch in September 2023. She’s also the founder of StrictlyVC, a daily e-newsletter and lecture series acquired by Yahoo in August 2023 and now operated as a sub brand of TechCrunch.
You can contact or verify outreach from Connie by emailing [email protected] or [email protected], or via encrypted message at ConnieLoizos.53 on Signal.
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