Robot Revolution: Truth or Hype?

**Dave** (0:02)
The Humanoid Robot Revolution is here. During NVIDIA's keynote last week, Jensen predicted that humanoids will be widely used in manufacturing within five years. We just saw China's Unitree G1 Humanoid. It did a record-breaking standing side flip. It can also spring to its feet from laying flat on its back. And most importantly, it can perfectly learn any TikTok dance, which answers the question, what exactly is China doing with our data? That G1 robot can be yours for a mere $16,000 a little closer to home. Our robots making some progress. Figure AIs 2 just learned how to walk more like a human. It's no longer doing the Biden shuffle thanks to an end-to-end neural network trained on high fidelity physics simulation. Also, Figure unveiled its automated production line. That's capable of making 12,000 humanoids a year, and they plan to scale that fleet to 100,000 robots within a few years. Over at Tesla, Optimus is making an appearance at Capitol Hill. It was there this week, and it's packing its bags for a trip to Mars in 2026 Tesla says that they hope to make about 5,000 Optimus bots this year, 50,000 next year, and scale exponentially from there. So with the robot revolution upon us today on Dumb Money, we are separating fact from fiction to tell you what's hype and what's real.

**Chris** (1:21)
This is Dumb Money Live.

**Dave** (1:26)
Hey there, Dave here, along with Chris and Jordan. We are Dumb Money. Welcome to Dumb Money Live. Quick reminder, if you don't mind, smash the like button. Helps us out with the old algorithm. Chris, Jordan, this is a show that we've been talking about doing for a while now. Humanoid is going to be an ongoing topic here for the foreseeable future. And today, before we deep dive into the specifics, I would like to kind of get a lay of the land. Chris, I know that you recently posted this list of, well, it went away, but you posted on X a list of the top 10 non-Chinese robot companies. And if we can, I just want to see if we could run through that list quickly and get kind of a one-sentence overview of where they currently stand.

**Chris** (2:13)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have the list in front of me, actually. I just pulled it up.

**Dave** (2:16)
I'll pull it up, too. But if we start with the first one on the list is one that hasn't publicly said anything about robots, humanoid robots, that's Apple.

**Chris** (2:25)
Apple, yeah. Apple has been working on electric vehicles for almost a decade. Obviously, they just ended that program, and rumor has it, and this is through numerous really good sources of mine that they have shifted the entire EV team over to a new secret initiative at Apple, developing humanoids. So Apple is taking humanoids really seriously. They're recruiting for their humanoid team, and word is that they are really happy with the progress that they've made, whatever that means. Do we trust them? Do we believe in them? To be able to actually produce something like this? I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but you have to give Apple some degree of acknowledgement that if they're able to pull it off on the hardware and software side, they do have the most trusted network in the world to be able to bring a product like this into the home in a trusted way and have it be fully integrated into your data, right, through the Apple ecosystem.

**Dave** (3:42)
I'm hoping that they're better at robotics than they are at actually launching Siri, and I hope that that robot is a little more capable than Siri on day one, but I'm very interested to see the Apple story with humanoids as that unfolds.

**Chris** (3:59)
By the way, I won't get into it right now, but a lot of what we'll talk about in this episode are timelines. I think the timelines are really skewed with people's perception of timelines, especially as it relates to homebots, because you hear some CEOs out there saying, hey, we're putting bots in the home starting this year. And you think, oh, wow, that means maybe I'll have my homebot in a year or two or three. I do not believe that's the case. But what we'll... So the Apple thing is far off, but they're taking it really seriously, and I expect them to likely, if they don't screw it up, be a major player in this space within 10 to 15 years.

**Dave** (4:39)
Let's go to the next one on the list. OpenAI, private company, they're not specifically building robots, they're more investing in other robots?