A new front opens between Zuckerberg and Musk over robots

When Mark Zuckerberg walked on stage the other day with those chunky black AI glasses, some viewed a possible future rival for the Apple iPhone.

- Tim Higgins

Others, however, saw the potential for a new front in a battle with Elon Musk over robots.

In Silicon Valley these days, it can be hard to keep track of how the various tech lords are trying to get a leg up on each other, and what they're competing over at any given moment. The Musk-Zuckerberg rivalry—once headed to the Colosseum for a cage fight —could be one for the ages, up there with the feud between Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.

So far, however, the stakes between them have been comparably small. Mostly, just bragging rights about the sizes of their manliness or fortunes. The 2023 introduction by Meta Platforms of a text-based social media platform, Threads, to compete with Musk’s X added some meat to things.

Now, things could get really interesting if Zuckerberg’s Meta and Musk’s Tesla are headed toward a collision involving humanoid robots.

Thanks in part to Musk’s showmanship, the prospect of humanoid robots is one of the hottest fields in tech.

Long the stuff of sci-fi fantasy, the technology holds the promise of becoming more real with recent advances in artificial intelligence. Whereas robots previously could be programmed to perform specific tasks, such as stacking boxes, it was a rigid and narrow set of abilities. Now, roboticists say they can use AI that learns from watching humans perform tasks, greatly opening up the use cases for robots.

“The promise of that is basically now we can very quickly add a whole host of new tasks where anything becomes fair game,” Jeff Cardenas, co-founder of a humanoid robot company called Apptronik, told me for Friday's “Bold Names” podcast. “And that kind of changes everything about what robots are capable of and where they can be applied in the future.”