Forbes December 31, 2025
Investors lost their minds, robots lost their balance and roboticists rolled their eyes. Meanwhile, visions of a $5 trillion robot revolution continued to enthrall.
In 2025, the Jetsons fantasy of a robot butler stopped feeling like retro-sci fi kitsch and started looking—if you squint through a teleoperator’s VR headset—almost plausible.
1X’s Neo household robot successfully loaded a dishwasher (at an excruciating pace); Chinese robots raced alongside humans in a half marathon; at August’s inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, more than 500 humanoids competed in hotel room cleaning and obstacle course navigation; and Tesla’s Optimus robot fell over — and went viral.
Meanwhile, investors poured $4.6 billion into the...
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