Why the humanoid workforce is running late

But Rus and many others I spoke with at the expo suggest that this hype just doesn’t add up.

Humanoids “are mostly not intelligent,” she said. Rus showed a video of herself speaking to an advanced humanoid that smoothly followed her instruction to pick up a watering can and water a nearby plant. It was impressive. But when she asked it to “water” her friend, the robot did not consider that humans don’t need watering like plants and moved to douse the person. “These robots lack common sense,” she said. 

I also spoke with Pras Velagapudi, the chief technology officer of Agility Robotics, who detailed physical limitations the company has to overcome too. To be strong, a humanoid needs a lot of power and a big battery. The stronger you make it and the heavier it is, the less time it can run without charging, and the more you need to worry about safety. A robot like this is also complex to manufacture.

Some impressive humanoid demos don’t overcome these core constraints as much as they display other impressive features: nimble robotic hands, for instance, or the ability to converse with people via a large language model. But these capabilities don’t necessarily translate well to the jobs that humanoids are supposed to be taking over (it’s more useful to program a long list of detailed instructions for a robot to follow than to speak to it, for example). 

This is not to say fleets of humanoids won’t ever join our workplaces, but rather that the adoption of the technology will likely be drawn out, industry specific, and slow. It’s related to what I wrote about last week: To people who consider AI a “normal” technology, rather than a utopian or dystopian one, this all makes sense. The technology that succeeds in an isolated lab setting will appear very different from the one that gets commercially adopted at scale. 

All of this sets the scene for what happened with one of the biggest names in robotics last week. Figure AI has raised a tremendous amount of investment for its humanoids, and founder Brett Adcock claimed on X in March that the company was the “most sought-after private stock in the secondary market.” Its most publicized work is with BMW, and Adcock has shown videos of Figure’s robots working to move parts for the automaker, saying that the partnership took just 12 months to launch. Adcock and Figure have generally not responded to media requests and don’t make the rounds at typical robot trade shows. 

In April, Fortune published an article quoting a spokesperson from BMW, alleging that the pair’s partnership involves fewer robots at a smaller scale than Figure has implied. On April 25, Adcock posted on LinkedIn that “Figure’s litigation counsel will aggressively pursue all available legal remedies—including, but not limited to, defamation claims—to correct the publication’s blatant misstatements.” The author of the Fortune article did not respond to my request for comment, and a representative for Adcock and Figure declined to say what parts of the article were inaccurate. The representative pointed me to Adcock’s statement, which lacks details.