Dancing isn’t enough — industry pushes for practical robots

Humanoid robots danced, somersaulted, dealt blackjack and played ping-pong at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, but some in the industry are impatient for them to become more useful, not just a promise of things to come.

- GLENN CHAPMAN

The Agibot X2 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

As robots take their usual spotlight at the annual CES gadget fest, insiders caution that making them truly like humans will take several more years and require lots of training.

To become autonomous, humanoid robots need AI that translates what is seen and heard into actions, which is beyond the scope of today’s large language models that power tools like ChatGPT.

Training a large language model relies on massive amounts of data — mainly vacuumed up from the internet — that is of little use when it comes to human-like robots seeking to be useful in the kitchen or on a factory floor.

“If you want robots to learn embodied things, you have to put them inside a body,” said Henny Admoni, an associate professor at the robotics institute at Carnegie Mellon University.