Tesla’s bot non-disclosure and why humanoid robots are taking off

At Tesla’s robotaxi reveal event last week, several Optimus humanoid robots mingled with guests, pouring drinks and cracking jokes. Impressive technology, but the vocals and some of the gesticulations appear to have been remotely controlled by humans, something Tesla did not disclose. Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan chatted with TechCrunch’s hardware editor Brian Heater about Tesla’s Optimus bots, the market opportunity for humanoid robots, and other companies that are leading the charge in this industry. We'll dive into: A CBInsights report which found that funding in 2024 already reached new highs for humanoid robots and PitchBook data that suggests funding into humanoid robot companies has reached close to $1 billion as of October. Where we're most likely to see humanoid robot applications in the coming years. Automakers like BMW plan to deploy startup Figure’s robots at their plants, and Amazon, which has been a huge proponent of robotics for over a decade now, has tested Agility’s digit robot at its warehouses. When we could see humanoid robots enter homes. Some companies plan to have their robots help older folks with household tasks like Kind Humanoid. Equity will be back on Friday with our weekly news roundup, so we'll talk to you then! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bellan and this is our Wednesday episode where we home in on a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Today, we're going to talk about humanoid robots and not just because of Tesla's Optimus Bot, because in case you didn't know, there are actually other companies who are owning this space. They're just maybe not as loud about it. I'm joined by fellow TSEer Brian Heater and Brian is our hardware editor over here at TechCrunch. I can't wait to get into all things robots with you. Brian, welcome to the show.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. It's good being on your flagship program.

• 0:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, yeah, I just really wanted to get your opinion after last week's Tesla WeRobot reveal. Because of the title of it, WeRobot, which is kind of like iRobot, we were expecting some kind of Optimus robot updates, if you will, alongside the robot taxi reveal. But I'm not sure that we really got many updates from it. We saw a lot of bots dancing around, apparently talking to people who were there, guests, investors, pouring drinks. But we didn't get anything really new. I think we maybe expected some more concrete details about sales. But what we did kind of learn is that, you know, the bots that were talking to people were actually being remote controlled. So yeah, thoughts on this?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Well, when you say we learned that, you don't mean that we learned that from the event. You mean that subsequently it was

• 1:35Rebecca Bellan?

  Oh, yes, yes. Sorry. That was not disclosed that the humanoid robots were being remotely controlled, at least insofar as people were talking for them remotely. I think that some of the movement of the bots was controlled by AI. But I mean, Elon hasn't exactly come out and given us any disclosures about this.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  If I had to guess, and which is good, we'll get some wild speculation off the top. I would guess at a certain amount of the motor control, so just the bipedal walking like you can do through AI, and it looked like they were walking through pretty straight paths. The issue with not disclosing, I was surprised that people were surprised about this only because, like, we've seen this happen before, and then, you know, you probably can relate to this, but you get like really in your own bubble and you don't realize that everyone is paying attention to the machinations, but this isn't the first time this has happened specifically with this robot. So Tesla's been showing, I guess you would say, progress videos since, it's been a couple of years now.

• 2:34Rebecca Bellan?

  They announced, I think in 2021 was the first time they said it was Optimus, and it was, you know, a guy in a suit, so.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Guy in a suit, yeah, so three years, and listen, for three years and essentially starting from scratch, I think that there's been some impressive stuff there. They've hired a lot of really smart people. I know they've got some folks from like Boston Dynamics, but the sense that I got from that event and the sense that I've gotten from other videos, such as a video of the Optimus folding a shirt, for example, which we later discovered there's a small hand doing the tele operations in the corner. In a sense, it's almost a lie by omission in that you're presenting it as this bleeding-edge technology, and if you don't disclose that it's being remotely operated by somebody, you effectively could give people the permission to fill in those dots.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  And obviously, and I won't go into how I feel about this matter, but a lot of people feel very strongly about Tesla and about Elon Musk's vision as a leader. And I think they're given to just assume that he's made the progress that appears apparent from the videos. But I think of it as being kind of a disservice to the industry at large, and perhaps you've seen this as well, you know, with the Tesla, the full self-driving. It's been years and years of them talking about that now. But shifting up the expectations of standard people so that when these things actually like come out into market and you see these in the real world, they're not able to live up to it, essentially.

• 4:02Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, a couple of things I want to say. About that. So I was texting with, you know, some investors who were there on the ground. And one of them, I included this in my story about this, but one of them said they sent me a video of the Optimus Bot. And it was talking and it was doing different accents and stuff. But to me, I was like, this feels like a person. It feels like a guy, like the voices just sounded so human. And, you know, they were gesticulating in synchronization with the way that they were speaking. And I asked him, do you think this is remotely controlled? Or do you think it's like Grok or something? And he was like, oh, I think it's Grok, which is, you know, for those who don't know, XAI is chatbot. And I was like, did you ask it, you know, how it was talking to you? He said, no, I was too blown away. And this is an event that is meant to spark investor confidence.

• 4:46Rebecca Bellan?

  That's meant to get people hyped to buy Tesla stock, to adopt their vision of the future. And I just think that for something like that, you should really be disclosing it. But, you know, you said in your piece, I'm not sure when that was written exactly, how to fake a robotics demo? That you said that a lie could travel, it was like a not Mark Twain quote.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a not Mark Twain.

• 5:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. And it was like a lie can travel around the world while this truth is still.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  The truth can put its shoes on or something like that.

• 5:09Rebecca Bellan?

  Exactly. And, and I think that this is something that Tesla has kind of gotten in hot water for doing before. Because, you know, as you called out with the FSD and also with autopilot, you know, years ago, there was a video of autopilot driving itself. And there was all these promises about autopilot being able to drive the Tesla vehicle itself. But what wasn't included in that video was how many times the car actually like drove into a stop sign or like drove into a tree or, or what have you. So it's just this kind of, yeah, as you say, a lie by omission that it does feel like a disservice. And there are other companies, I think you pointed to, was it Boston Dynamics? That they often, when they release videos showing their tech, it's, you know, a full video without cuts. So you can kind of tell.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Well, yes and no, like specifically in the case of Boston Dynamics. They basically got famous doing viral videos. It's been like two decades at this point.

• 6:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, they're creepy little dogs.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dignitas is a big dog and, and they've gotten really good at doing that. But something that they started doing, I think relatively recently is showing all the outtakes. And that's really useful. You should go into every robot demo that you're not seeing live, that you're not seeing unedited, the same way that you go into a commercial, understanding that, you know, there could have been 50 takes. Somebody could have been controlling this thing. It could be just creative editing. And listen, if Elon Musk is good at nothing else, he's good at self-promotion. And yeah, as a commercial for what could be in the future, it seemed to be pretty effective. And yeah, I don't know that, honestly, when it comes to people who are fans and excited, I wonder how much ultimately the truth matters.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  That might be a separate conversation.

• 6:50Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I think sometimes it doesn't matter. And I think people have an emotional and financial stake in Tesla. Like, it's both, right? Like, in our coverage of the Tesla robot taxi event, we included some skepticism about Elon Musk sticking to timelines and whether or not the tech will get there. And he's been saying FSD next year, this year, for how many years now? And that's context that it makes sense to provide in a piece of reporting about whatever Tesla is writing about. But the hate that we got online for it was actually pretty... I mean, it's not surprising to me. I get it all the time. But it's from people who are like, "Why aren't you just in awe of this technology?" I'm like, "Because I'm not here to be in awe of technology. I'm here to provide context about it." So...

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Though, in the debate world, there's a rhetorical device called the Gish Gallop, which is basically when you throw so much information at somebody, they don't know what to rebut. And I get the sense that there's a lot of this happening here. There are so many announcements. I don't have it in front of me, but that initial story from 2021, go back and look at whatever the timeline was that, see how much the end zone has shifted on that one. Effectively, you know, you make promises, then you move on to the next big flashy thing, and people tend to forget about those specific timelines, and they don't really matter to people. But the truth is, is that there are companies out there... You mentioned Bostadynamics. They're in an interesting space right now. They're also owned by a car company

• 8:09Speaker 01

  who has a vested interest in creating these robots for the factory floor. I point to Agility as the example of, I guess you could say, the veteran at this point in terms of having had this robot for a long time, having done these in-person demos for a long time. If you go to a show... I go to a few robotic shows a year, and whenever they're there, they have their robots just running. And you see it, warts and all. You'll see occasionally one of them will fall down. Like, that's a part of the process. But there's several companies right now that have had pilots and that are taking the next steps. And agility is the first one to actually have gone beyond pilot.

• 8:47Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, I do want to talk about agility and some of these other companies as well. But before we do, just quickly for our listeners, why are we seeing such a push in the humanoid robotic space? Like, it's not all just Tesla. There's a few companies that are raising money in this field. I believe CB Insights, a report from March, found that by then already, the industry had reached new highs for humanoid robot investment. It was 775 million from then. Based on my just like quick pitch book data looking today, I found that it's almost 1 billion invested in VC money this year to date. And that's actually fewer deals than they were last year. So what is really pushing this investor interest?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Sure, there's a confluence of things dating back to the pandemic. There is a huge push in automation. Obviously, a lot of people weren't able to go to work and companies had to figure out how to continue. You know, Amazon has been a big proponent of robotics for over a decade now. Humanoids, well, one, I mean, the technology is there or close to there. That's a big part of it. Generative AI is actually going to be a really interesting part of this as well as the conversational piece is just part of it, but that's important for safety reasons. I think that certainly Tesla did its part to perhaps excite some investors and some of these folks who had already been working on this technology for a long time came out of the woodwork.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Effectively, the benefits of humanoid technologies, the biggest one is that we build the world for ourselves. So you walk into a factory and it's a factory that's built for a human to work in. And the idea is that you can effectively just like slot one of these pieces of technology in there. It's what they call a brownfield factory instead of a greenfield factory, which means you don't have to basically just start from scratch with the automation aspect of things. And then there are just certain terrains, obviously. There are things that the robot can walk over that people can't. So I think it's just general excitement around. Around the warehouse side of things, the notion is that if and when that happens and these

• 10:53Speaker 01

  robots get to scale, then we can actually start having conversations about bringing the price down and perhaps bringing them into the home as well.

• 11:00Rebecca Bellan?

  So in terms of manufacturing, as you say, brownfield manufacturing, do analysts, investors, whatever, think that it'll be cheaper to build humanoid robots and just plug them right into existing factories versus kind of retooling for a different type of automation that's not based on something that it's bipedal?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  So I would point to Amazon again, just because they're like about 10 years ahead of everybody else when it comes to like automating their fulfillment centers. They recently had an event in Nashville that they do every year, and they announced that the Shreveport, Louisiana, yeah, the Shreveport fulfillment center is going to be the first of their new high-tech fulfillment centers. I spoke with their head of robotics the other week, Ty Brady, and he told me last week that it's an existing fulfillment center because even a company with the resources like Amazon, you can't just stop everything. Those packages still need to go out. So what makes the most sense is to just plug it into these existing systems effectively.

• 11:55Rebecca Bellan?

  Hmm. Two things on that. One, Shreveport, Louisiana, also the home of Fangtasia for those who used to watch True Blood. And the other thing is, we say that there's this labor shortage, and maybe this is more of a philosophical question, but like.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  No, let's get into it.

• 12:10Rebecca Bellan?

  Everyone's like, there's labor shortages, and that's why we need robots to whatever. I'm like, are there labor shortages? Or do companies like Amazon just like not want to pay workers and they want to just like, you know, lower whatever costs they would spend on human workers so that they can increase their profits and buy back more stock? Or I'm getting philosophical and cynical.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  I mean, the answer is yes to both of those things. Something really important to look at is how expectations have shifted specifically with e-commerce. And, you know, I was in the city for a long time, but I've moved out to the boonies right now, and I still have an expectation that I can get a package like same or next day.

• 12:46Rebecca Bellan?

  Within two hours.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that requires more people. They're having trouble backfilling old jobs. Like, because of outside forces, the salary on the Amazon factory floor has gone up. So that's. Certainly a good thing. I don't see an outcome in which these kinds of jobs don't get automated, but there's a good outcome and a bad outcome.

• 13:06Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  The bad outcome is that all of those people get displaced and put out of jobs. And there's nothing we can do. The good outcome is that those jobs get a little bit easier, that they're assisted, that there's this concept of upskilling. I'm a little bit on the fence in terms of its efficacy, especially with, you know, older folks who've been doing this their entire life. It's a little harder to train some people to learn how to program a robot if you've been working on a factory floor your entire life. But there's a good future in which these things like ultimately like help us do our jobs and improve the quality of life. And then there's this cynical and very possibly realistic future that it just continues to widen the income gap.

• 13:51Rebecca Bellan?

  All right, Brian, we have to go to break now. But when we come back, I want to talk to you about where else we're going to see these robots beyond the factory floor.

• 14:04Rebecca Bellan?

  What about other uses for humanoid robots, right? Like Elon Musk says, this can be your best friend. He can do your shopping and it can pour your drinks and do whatever, household tasks. So are we expecting wide home use? Like, is that something that the market really thinks is going to happen for humanoid robots? Just having like a little $30,000 assistant at your house?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  So the dirty truth of all of this is right now, especially when we're talking about a factory setting, that like, single-purpose robots make a lot of sense. They tend to be cheaper. They do their jobs really well. Most applications in the house right now, if we ever do get to the point where like they are cheap enough, doesn't make sense to have one robot that can do every single job. Probably not. You're circling into very complicated conversations around generalized intelligence, which is a robot that can effectively like continue to teach itself, to learn as it goes, to adapt to new things. It's a lot harder to adapt to situations in the home than it is the factory, for example. The factory is, it's got very sort of clear, there's lines on the floors, there's

• 15:07Speaker 01

  aisles. I would even like go so far as to say that the stakes are obviously higher when you're talking about a self-driving car. But that at least there are signs on the road and there's sunlight and and you know, people aren't constantly moving things around. So it's a lot harder of a problem to solve. The price is going to have to come down considerably. And we're going to have to have a very frank conversation about safety. I think one of the most interesting aspects of this idea of robots into the home is older adults who want to continue to live independently. If you can have some sort of automated machine come in and help them lead their lives, like that's a great application. But especially in a case like that, you need the robots to be incredibly safe.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  And now, before we put these things in the factory, like this is the time when we need to be having really frank conversations about whether or not it is safe to have a large piece of metal, you know, spinning around next to people.

• 16:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, I think Elon has actually mentioned that the robot would be, you know, not more than like 120 pounds and you could overpower it. He's talked about that, but not that I'm really worried about robots attacking you. Well, who knows?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  I mean, you can overpower a baseball bat, but it'll still hurt you.

• 16:16Rebecca Bellan?

  That's true. Yeah. Well, anytime you put robots alongside humans, they're, yeah, we need to define the safety standards. And is anyone or any startups or incumbents in the industry having these conversations and talking with lawmakers to try to define like what safety standards we need for humanoid robots interacting with humans?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Presumably if these things get to scale, then this is going to start being the domain of like OSHA, National Labor Relations Board, places like that. People are having the conversation. Unfortunately, they actually don't exist anymore. There was a company called Vio that was doing a lot of safety around cobots, which is short for like robots, collaborative robots that are meant to work alongside people. So yes, I think Melanie Wise, founder of Fetch, who is now the CTO of Agility, she's been really good about this kind of thing. She wants to have that conversation. But there's just a really big question around whether or not we're rushing too fast to get these things out there. How much of this is the hype cycle? If you look traditionally, robots have been in cages on industrial floors.

• 17:16Rebecca Bellan?

  What?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  To protect people from it.

• 17:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Really?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, most.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Of these really heavy, large, industrial robotic arms.

• 17:23Rebecca Bellan?

  That is so dystopian.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  I mean cages, when I say cages, they call them cages, but there's like a fence around them just so you don't walk into the arms that's swinging around. It's like that kind of thing. This has only really started opening up fairly recently. Certainly even like the Amazon, those Kiva robots, the AMRs, the little sort of portable drivetrain machines that they have, like those all operate in a specific section that people aren't supposed to walk into. And if they do, the workers who fix the robots, like they have this vest with a piece of technology on it that will stop the robot basically from slamming into you. So autonomy is going to be a really big part of it. There's reason to be hopeful on that front. If you, I finally saw one in person after years of writing about it. I can't remember

• 18:07Speaker 01

  what supermarket, but I saw one of those inventory robots. Have you seen one of those in person?

• 18:11Rebecca Bellan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  It's scanning the shelf.

• 18:13Rebecca Bellan?

  All over, yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. So at low speeds, you know, we're capable of doing that. And certainly that's as far as like safety concerns, you know, you've got children running around. So there are steps being taken, but I do think that a lot of the kind of governing, the regulatory bodies around the workplace, again, are going to have to take a good, long look at automation for all sorts of reasons.

• 18:34Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, factory floor and in the home and just, yeah, just generally wherever we put them. But just touching briefly on your point about humanoid robots with old folks, I think that's a great idea. I think that's something you would see in Japan first, probably.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:47Rebecca Bellan?

  They seem like they're really leading robotics and a lot of the reason is because they have an aging population and a decreasing workforce size. So they're kind of supplementing with robotics because they historically, I don't think have been a country that's super keen on immigration.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's 100% accurate. I don't know, in terms of like efficacy, that's sort of another question, like how useful are these things? They've been exploring it for a few decades now. As you said, I went to TRI, Toyota Research Institute in San Francisco like a year or two ago and looked at kind of what they were doing in that space. A lot of it really comes down to funding. A lot of it comes down to how to actually make money doing these sorts of things. Certainly for older people partnering with a home Home could make sense, you know, like if there's FDA approval, you know, if this is like an actual like a medically assisted device. But in terms of the money, I mean, there's a lot of reasons, but this is one of the main reasons why Roomba,

• 19:43Speaker 01

  the first Roomba came onto the market more than 20 years ago, and there hasn't been another non-robotic home vacuum. And that's a big part of the reason, pricing, because even like Roombas are still like 900 bucks at this point, and they just do one thing.

• 19:58Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, that's so here's my prediction about robotics. I'm sure other people have made it to, or about humanoid robots and the investment that's gone into it. I think that we're going to see that kind of early-stage hype cycle. We'll see a lot of money. Although there have been some later-stage deals, I will say that this year, but I think that the money will dry up eventually once we get to even later stage because it's just such a high capex. But similar to robotaxis and autonomous vehicles, there was like a big push of funding. And then as a lot of these companies kind of fell over, the funding dried up. There's now a second wave that's happening that we're seeing investment happen again with new AI advancements. But I think a lot of investors are like, wow, this is super risky, like it is high capex.

• 20:38Rebecca Bellan?

  It is a long timeline until we ever see profits and that kind of could stifle some growth. But we have seen some investment this year. So what are some of the top startups that you have covered? I think Figure you mentioned earlier.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Oh geez, let me actually ask you like back up a second. So when you talk about it drying up, are you specifically referring to humanoids or just robotics in general?

• 20:58Rebecca Bellan?

  Maybe humanoids. I think that it's just such a trendy, yeah, it feels real trendy because Elon Musk is talking about it, right? So.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  That I think that that's a fair assessment. I think we like, we've, again, we really need to figure out what these timelines are. We really need to figure out ultimately how useful these things are. If you just look at like robotics broadly, I don't think that's an accurate statement only because there are so many different areas.

• 21:19Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Maybe the manufacturing has gone down, but there's a lot of money going into like food preparation. Like there's, there's still all of these places that could be automated. There's still a lot of excitement. There are, I would say, like a handful of companies that I would point to as actually like have been down this road to a point where I'm sort of really comfortable talking about. Them, Boston Am is interesting because they spent thirty five years just being a research institute. Obviously, they figured out how to commercialize things because you'll see the spots out in the world. And they've got Stretch, which is an unloading, unpacking robot for warehouses. But they showed off their electric Atlas system, which is incredibly impressive, but we've only seen a few quick demos there. They're going to start with automotive in much the same way that Tesla will eventually.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Apptronic, one of them has a deal with BMW, the other one has a deal with Mercedes. You know, it makes a lot of sense in these already automotive has been automating manufacturing for like, basically since like the sixties or seventies at this point, they've had robotics in there. So like, these are very well-run places and you can really plug these systems in there. So that's really going to be the tip of the spear when it comes to like actually starting to see these robots in the world. Apptronic, which I mentioned is interesting because a lot of that team came over from Valkyrie, NASA humanoid robot that you've seen over the last few years. I think Agility is the most interesting, again, just from the stage that they're in and the fact that they're far ahead of everybody.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Figure is interesting because Figure has gotten so, like so much of that money that you mentioned earlier was Figure. They've had huge investments.

• 22:51Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, six seventy five million this year.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia. I should mention that Nvidia is a big part of a lot of the stuff exploding right now because they've done some really great work when it comes to actually like the programming, the development side of things, and also obviously the AI part of that as well. One X, they did a demo. I wasn't super impressed by the home robot demo, but I do think that it is interesting that they're exploring that side of things. And they were maybe the first to really start talking about effectively like being the physical piece of generative AI because they had an early investment from OpenAI as well. And you're going to see a lot of these, again, be wary of all of them.

• 23:30Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, especially the ones with faces, right? Like, I feel like those, to me, if I see that it has like a humanish looking face that's super creepy and it like has these micro movements, is that like a red flag to you? Because to me, it kind of is a little bit, or mostly just because it's creepy, but.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  From the standpoint of where the money has gone and where these people are spending their. Time. I don't know if you're thinking of any specifically, but those tend to be hospitality is the one market that they're really talking about. I don't think that that's a huge market. It's one that's been explored a lot. Remember the pepper robot from a few years ago? They thought hospitality was going to be a big market, but most hotels don't necessarily just want a robot welcoming people in there.

• 24:11Rebecca Bellan?

  More of a gimmick.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's, you know, it'll be interesting to see what Apple does eventually in this space, but like a lot of the electronics manufacturers, Samsung, Xiaomi, they've shown off demos and then that's all they've shown. I went to a Samsung one a few years ago and they showed all these like quote unquote home robots that I don't think we've seen since in the last three years. And I asked them if I could get a demo of the robots that wasn't this almost like Chuck E. Cheese kind of. They're literally doing the Chuck E. Cheese thing of every 20 minutes, like they would do the demo and

• 24:40Rebecca Bellan?

  Oh, my God.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Nobody would do it outside of that. So like robots are sort of a shorthand way of telling investors that you're working on something. And this loops us back to the beginning until you can actually see it in person doing that job. Just don't put too much stock into anything.

• 24:54Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. And in terms of timelines, when we will see these things, I mean, it's difficult to say everyone has their timelines for the record. Elon Musk, I think, said earlier this year that he expected Optimus to be on sale in 2026. So, I mean, take that with a grain of salt. But I was reading before this call, Morgan Stanley in August said that they expect the number of US humanoid robots to reach 63 million units by 2050, with a $3 trillion impact to wages and that by 2040, the US may even have 8 million working humanoid robots. So I don't know. What do you think? Does that sound reasonable? Are we going to have that many humanoid robots the next 15 years?

• 25:30Speaker 01

  I don't know that like at a certain point, those numbers start to get so abstract when we're talking about like 2050. I tend to not make those predictions, especially because I think that they just always end up being really bullish, right?

• 25:43Rebecca Bellan?

  And they are bullish. This was Adam Jonas from Morgan Stanley, who's like a Tesla bull, although, yeah, so.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Even in cases where where that industry has progressed, there's like very few examples of anything like being anywhere near where the analysts projected them to be. I do think that they're going to be useful. Going forward, I do think that we're going to start seeing them in the next few years, like actually on the factory floor, they'll probably actually get to the point where they're not even like super novel for a lot of people working alongside them. If we ever hit generalized intelligence, that's a big question. It still feels like it's a long ways off at this point. And as far as actually getting these things like outside the factory, I don't know. If I had to guess, and I'm not a roboticist, I'd be saying like decades at this point.

• 26:25Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, good to bring us back down to earth. All right. I think that's probably it for us today. Where can listeners connect with you online besides, of course, on TechCrunch? You're a Mastodon man, right?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  I'm on Bluesky. I am the only one.

• 26:39Rebecca Bellan?

  Blue Sky, different decentralized platform. Yeah, you're on Blue Sky.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  I do my podcast every week. Can I plug that?

• 26:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Definitely plug that. I didn't even know about this. How did I not know?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a, I do an interview podcast that I've done for the past like 11 or so years called R I Y L. It's at R I Y L cast, C A S T dot com.

• 26:57Rebecca Bellan?

  Amazing. Okay. And thanks so much for joining us on the show. And to our listeners, you can find me at Rebecca Boulon on X and Rebecca Boulon underscore writes on threads. And of course, you can find Equity on X and threads at Equity Pod. Talk to you Friday.

• 27:12Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator. And we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.