OP's main point is that none of these humanoid manufacturers have a real-world product that regular consumers want to buy. The bulk of customers so far are robot researchers. Furthermore, OP says LLMs don't seem to be scaling for embodied AI as they are for reasoning, so such a product is far off.

I'm not convinced.

Firstly, the money going into Chinese robotics is orders of magnitude smaller than the $3.7 trillion going into US AI. If China has a comparable bubble, then surely that's its property bubble.

Second, OP has picked examples of embodied AI failures, but seems to have ignored examples of success. So is this just cherry-picking?

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) reported 140+ manufacturers and 330+ humanoid models by the end of 2025. Inevitably, most of those will fail or be bought up, but the money involved is a drop in the ocean as a proportion of Chinese GDP. That's not the case for US AI, where that $3.7 trillion is 12% of US GDP.

My guess? The cutting edge of embodied AI looks much closer to a viable product than OP thinks. Quadruped robots are already valuable workplace tools, & by 2030 I'd guess people will be saying the same about humanoids.

China’s Overhyped Embodied AI Sector

Blind consumption is annihilation: for you, for other species, for the planet. And consumption cannot be checked unless you address the consumer. By consumer, I don’t mean the one with money. I mean the ego. Unless the ego is seen and understood, nothing else will change.

Technology will keep advancing, and it should. Even if you legislate against progress, curiosity won’t disappear. Exploration is human nature. We will keep probing what lies beyond.

The trouble is, our curiosity rarely turns inward. Even our endless investigation of the world is a disguised search for the self. We want to know who we are, so we keep dissecting everything around us.

The real question is: Who is consuming this science? With what intention is a technology developed? For what purpose does money fund research? Nuclear energy can light a city, or flatten it.

Is the knower wise? Is the consumer sane? Because supply will keep overflowing. Markets will expand. Products will multiply. The question is: Are we ready?

Technology Isn’t the Problem, You Are

You cannot stop supply. You must awaken demand. You cannot stop shops from selling goods, but you can awaken the buyer. When the consumer transforms, the producer must follow. If wisdom doesn’t guide the seller, market failure eventually will.

Educate the masses. Awaken intelligence in the ordinary person.

No other solution will work.

Scientists say they’ve solved a major engineering puzzle for the space elevator and have the perfect construction material. Proposed elevator can significantly reduce travel to the Moon and Mars in the future.

While the U.S. still holds considerable advantages gained through its earlier lunar explorations, China’s planned mission could provide it with a crucial edge.

Videos today already look extremely clear, but technology will obviously keep improving.
Do you think people in the future will look at our current videos and feel they look old or primitive, the same way we feel when watching videos from the past?

He added that the public will be alerted to an impending heatwave at least four days in advance via the national weather app myENV. If a centre is nearly full, priority will be given to vulnerable folk, such as elderly people, Chong said.

JPMorgan says humanoids are approaching a cost that undercuts warehouse labor. That is when a science project becomes an industrial market.