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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

'Goldbugs' are a type of investor who scorns fiat money & stocks, convinced the only thing that will ever hold eternal value is gold. The problem with this idea? The gold in the asteroid belt: potentially tens of billions to trillions of times more than humanity has ever mined. One day gold will be as cheap and disposable as the aluminum foil wrappers people throw in the garbage.

But how soon?

This research points out that many of the previous barriers; relatively cheap space access and advanced robotics, are already solved problems. The biggest remaining barrier? Data & software. Put another way, the robots & AI learning what to do to be able to asteroid mine. As we are in the era when AI is making quick work of software & data challenges, this brings asteroid mining closer.

Mining beyond Earth with Space Robots: Exploration, Sampling, and Extraction

We're going back to the lunar surface for the first time in more than a century, and this time, we're staying

"If corporations profit from replacing human workers with automation, they should contribute to helping those workers transition to the next opportunity," Ramsey said

Trade unions threaten to withhold support for politicians, joining the building backlash

Anti-data center activists come from diverse backgrounds and feel that elected officials are prioritizing tech corporations over constituents, leading to arrests for minor infractions like going over allotted time for public comments.

A new report details startling security breaches by OpenAI agents—using a model that helped cause them.

U.N. and Red Cross leaders warn the world is nearing a “moral red line” on autonomous weapons, urging bans on unpredictable systems and “killer robots” that target people as regulation lags.

We already have systems in our homes that protect us when something goes wrong. Electrical breakers, smoke and gas detectors, water leak sensors, shutoff valves, security systems, etc. Most of these work independently from the device that might be causing the problem. So if we eventually have capable robots moving around our homes, should we depend only on the robot and its manufacturer for safety? Maybe every home will need some kind of independent control system, almost like a breaker panel for robots and smart devices. Every robot or appliance added to the home would connect to it, and the homeowner could use it to cut the power, internet connection or movement. The manufacturer shouldn't be able to bypass it through its own cellular connection or something else.

This isn't really a new invention. I have Home Assistant running locally on a Raspberry Pi, and it can already connect to many different devices. Technically, I can put smart plugs on appliances and shut off their power when needed. We already have separate sensors that can detect smoke, gas leaks, water leaks or movement. It would be more about putting these things together, adapting them to robots and making the whole thing a standard instead of something some people install for fun. Maybe the house could detect unusual robot movement or some other problem and tell it to stop. There could also be a physical master switch for all robots, along with separate controls for each one.

Simply cutting the power may not always be safe though. What if the robot is carrying a child, hot food or something heavy? The robot would need a small set of local emergency instructions that don't depend on the cloud. Put the person or object in a predetermined safe place, sit down, disconnect and sound an alarm. Most of the technology for something like this already exists. But in a future where robots are common inside homes, maybe it becomes part of the house itself, and possibly even required by building codes in some communities. Maybe robot safety shouldn't depend only on the robot. The house itself should also be able to supervise and stop it. Would you want a separate local safety system controlling every robot operating inside your home?