Nearly 90% of Humanoid Robots Are Made in China

MIT Technology Review, the tech magazine, asked whether today's AI can finally produce a true general-purpose humanoid robot. Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimus, is built by the company run by CEO Elon Musk. Musk estimates its minimum price at $20,000. He says the robot could go on open sale by the end of 2027. Investment bank Morgan Stanley forecasts that by 2050 almost 1 billion humanoid robots will be in use. That would be a $5 trillion market.

Leading researchers are skeptical of this timeline. Yann LeCun, an AI pioneer and Meta's former chief AI scientist, spoke at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. He said no company building humanoid robots knows how to make them smart enough to be useful. Jonathan Hurst, co-founder of robotics company Agility Robotics, made a similar point. He said making a robot look like a human is easy. Getting it to move and act like a human is much harder.

The most advanced AI for robots running today is Gemini Robotics from Google DeepMind. It is what's called a vision-language-action model: it reads a scene, then commands the robot's arms. Trained on videos of people doing household chores, it can pack a lunchbox or pick up pea pods with kitchen tongs. But only if it has already seen that exact task before. Ask it to do something outside its training, and it mostly fails.

Some researchers are now chasing a different kind of AI: world models. These systems learn from video, 3D scans, and sensor data how objects move, fall, and collide. World Labs, a startup founded by Stanford researcher Fei-Fei Li, raised $1 billion in February 2026. Chipmaker AMD bought it in September of that year for $8.2 billion. LeCun's own startup, AMI Labs, raised $1 billion in March 2026. Li herself calls this direction still "nascent." LeCun has put it bluntly: the AI methods behind chatbots do not work for the physical world. A robot that can replace human hands everywhere remains a research problem, not a product you can buy.