Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently mentioned in an interview that humanoid robots will become as popular as cars in the future. Huang also expects significant progress in robotics technology within the next two to three years. Elon Musk responded to this view and believes that the popularity of humanoid robots in the future will be ten times higher than that of cars.
Will humanoid robots be as ubiquitous as cars in the future, as the technology industry's bigwigs believe?
On Monday night (June 17), a user on social media platform X shared a clip of NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun's interview in which he talked about the future of humanoid robots.
In the video clip, Huang Renxun compared the popularity of future humanoid robots to that of cars. He predicted that humanoid robots will become as commonplace as autos and that robotics technology will make significant progress in the next two to three years.
Referring to the evolution of cars during the more than one century since their inception, Huang Renxun said, "I think that 100 years later, we will see humanoid robots everywhere."
Musk agreed with Huang Renxun's statement, stating that "their (humanoid robots) ubiquity will be ten times higher than that of cars."
In June, Musk also expressed his thoughts in a live broadcast, predicting that the number of humanoid robots in the world will one day surpass the human population.
"I think, in the long run, the ratio of humans to humanoid robots will exceed 1:1. That is to say, one person may have two or more humanoid robots."
Musk is also very bullish on Tesla's own humanoid robot, Optimus. Musk expects that once the robot reaches mass production, its price will be between $10,000 and $20,000, lower than Tesla's cheapest Model 3 sedan.
The next trend
In March of this year, NVIDIA also officially entered the humanoid robot race. NVIDIA launched its first humanoid robot universal base model, Project GR00T, and a new humanoid robot computer, Jetson Thor, based on the NVIDIA Thor system-level chip (SoC), at the GTC2024 conference.
Huang Renxun said at the time that NVIDIA decided to develop humanoid robots because most of the data used to train robots comes from human movements.
"To write software for computers, we use data or training examples, and computers learn from those examples. The most data we have is from human movement cases, not any other data."
In addition to Tesla and NVIDIA's progress in humanoid robots, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon are investing in humanoid robot start-up Figure AI, and Amazon's Agility Robotics is building a super factory specifically for mass-producing humanoid robots.
The moves of many tech giants seem to be releasing signals of the next trend, namely the age of robots is approaching.