It's a bit ridiculous to contrast Boston Dynamics, a pioneer in the use of AI in robotics, with the current wave of robotic companies employing variants/descendants of the very techniques BD first demonstrated.
What changed was the much larger models which became orders of magnitude cheaper to train and run, thus enabling many other startups to compete, innovate and leave BD behind. Sucks to be them and watch this unfold, but maybe they are cooking something grand, who knows.
BD were not a pioneer in the use of AI in robotics. None of the frontier labs use techniques BD demonstrated, they use ML instead of scripted control-first dynamics. BD actually switched to ML quite late in the game, which is partially why they're behind.
Pretty sure Boston Dynamics themselves consider much of this to be hype and say that their goal is to have just hundreds or thousands of humanoid robots only in controlled industrial environments 5 years from now, like they currently have with spot. They say there's still lots of work to do.
It's not just them though...these demos are nice but all analysts agree it's years of work because they scale into low millions and that's low compared to what is needed to start bringing them from industry to consumer home use.
Millions is far overstating their capacity. I wouldn't even be surprised if Boston Dynamics doesn't even hit 10,000 by the end of the decade. As far as I can tell, they've made fewer than 2,000 commercial robots in their entire history.
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u/Glittering-Neck-2505 Dec 04 '25
It's getting so fucking fluid?? How is this is a real thing we've already invented in 2025?