Why "general purpose" is the wrong way to think about humanoid robots
Every humanoid company on the planet uses the word "general purpose". Researchers say that framing hides where the real value is going to land.
Crédit photo: Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash · source
Every humanoid pitch deck contains the same two words: "general purpose". The phrase has done a lot of fundraising work over the last three years. Researchers who actually build these systems are increasingly uncomfortable with it.
MIT Technology Review's latest analysis is the clearest version of the argument so far. Behind the marketing language, every working humanoid in the wild is heavily specialised in practice. It runs a narrow set of tasks, in a narrow environment, on a narrow schedule. The "general" part is almost entirely aspirational.
General purpose is a phrase we keep on the website. — Anonymous humanoid founder (via MIT Technology Review)
The honest framing
A more honest framing might be "human-shaped specialist". The reason humanoids are human-shaped is so they can use environments that humans built. The actual job they perform inside that environment is almost always a single well-defined workflow.
That is fine. That is also a much smaller claim than the marketing suggests. It is also where the commercial value will actually appear.
IEEE Spectrum captured the same point from inside a major manufacturer: "The robot looks human; the workflow is specialised."
How this changes the investment thesis
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