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.

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.

'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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I've so many head-scratching questions.

• Why is China spending so little to achieve almost comparable results?

• If AI is inherently deflationary, where does the revenue come from to cover this?

• US Big Tech used to rely on global sales (the EU in particular, usually being around 35% of all revenues), but that's shrinking. All the trends are pushing for more tech sovereignty, not less.

• We have centuries of evidence, stretching back to the 17th-century Dutch Tulip Craze, that in Capitalism, booms always end in a bust. Will AI be the exception?

• Even if there is a US stock market bust, AI use will still grow around the world, but how, and with whose AI? It feels like Open-Source is going to triumph in the end. Who knows, maybe that's a sign of the post-scarcity economy to come.

Why Big Tech's AI spending is bigger than you think

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