But the commercial boom in artificial intelligence has lit a spark under long-simmering visions to build humanoid robots that can move their mechanical bodies like humans and do things that people do.

Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, gathered more than 2,000 people this week, including top robotics engineers from Disney, Google and dozens of startups, to showcase their technology and debate what it will take to accelerate a nascent industry.

Alaoui says many researchers now believe humanoids or some other kind of physical embodiment of AI are “going to become the norm.”

“The question is really just how long it will take,” he said.

Disney’s contribution to the field, a walking robotic version of “Frozen” character Olaf, will be roaming on its own through Disneyland theme parks in Hong Kong and Paris early next year. Entertaining and highly complex robots that resemble a human — or a snowman — are already here, but the timeline for “general purpose” robots that are a productive member of a workplace or household is farther away.

Even at a conference designed to build enthusiasm for the technology, held at a Computer History Museum that’s a temple to Silicon Valley’s previous breakthroughs, skepticism remained high that truly humanlike robots will take root anytime soon.

“The humanoid space has a very, very big hill to climb,” said Cosima du Pasquier, founder and CEO of Haptica Robotics, which works to give robots a sense of touch. “There’s a lot of research that still needs to be solved.”

The Stanford University postdoctoral researcher came to the conference in Mountain View, California, just a week after incorporating her startup.

“The first customers are really the people here,” she said.

Researchers at the consultancy McKinsey & Company have counted about 50 companies around the world that have raised at least $100 million to develop humanoids, led by about 20 in China and 15 in North America.

China is leading in part due to government incentives for component production and robot adoption and a mandate last year “to have a humanoid ecosystem established by 2025,” said McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar. Displays by Chinese firms dominated the expo section of this week’s summit, held Thursday and Friday.

In the U.S., the advent of generative AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini has jolted the decades-old robotics industry in different ways. Investor excitement has poured money into ambitious startups aiming to build hardware that will bring a physical presence to the latest AI.

But it’s not just crossover hype — the same technical advances that made AI chatbots so good at language have played a role in teaching robots how to get better at performing tasks. Paired with computer vision, robots powered by “visual-language” models are trained to learn about their surroundings.

One of the most prominent skeptics is robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of Roomba vacuum maker iRobot who wrote in September that “today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.” Brooks didn’t attend but his essay was frequently mentioned.

Also missing was anyone speaking for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s development of a humanoid called Optimus, a project that the billionaire is designing to be “extremely capable” and sold in high volumes. Musk said three years ago that people can probably buy an Optimus “within three to five years.”

The conference’s organizer, Alaoui, founder and general partner of ALM Ventures, previously worked on driver attention systems for the automotive industry and sees parallels between humanoids and the early years of self-driving cars.

Near the entrance to the summit venue, just blocks from Google’s headquarters, is a museum exhibit showing Google’s bubble-shaped 2014 prototype of a self-driving car. Eleven years later, self-driving cars full of passengers operated by Google affiliate Waymo are constantly plying the streets nearby.

Some robots with human elements are already being tested in workplaces. Oregon-based Agility Robotics announced shortly before the conference that it is bringing its tote-carrying warehouse robot Digit to a Texas distribution facility run by Mercado Libre, the Latin American e-commerce giant. Much like the Olaf robot, it has inverted legs that are more birdlike than human.

Industrial robots performing single tasks are already commonplace in car assembly and other manufacturing. They work with a level of speed and precision that’s difficult for today’s humanoids — or humans themselves — to match.

The head of a robotics trade group founded in 1974 is now lobbying the U.S. government to develop a stronger national strategy to advance the development of homegrown robots, be they humanoids or otherwise.

“We have a lot of strong technology, we have the AI expertise here in the U.S.,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, after touring the expo Thursday. “So I think it remains to be seen who is the ultimate leader in this. But right now, China has certainly a lot more momentum on humanoids.”

Driscoll, who is currently the chairman of UConn Health after a 25-year career in health care including a previous position as Walgreens Boots Alliance president, said the policy reversal amounts to “a self‑inflicted wound” that will push costs up for both low‑income families and the affluent professionals who thought they were insulated.​

Driscoll cited CBO estimates that if Congress allows the subsidies to lapse, premiums will jump for roughly 24 million marketplace enrollees, and around 2 million people will lose coverage entirely in the near term. 

Enhanced premium tax credits, introduced during the pandemic and extended through 2025, have helped double marketplace enrollment and kept average subsidized premiums under about $900 a year. When they expire, KFF News projects a roughly 114% increase in average premium payments for subsidized enrollees in 2026. Older adults and rural residents would be especially exposed, with KFF also warning that adults ages 50 to 64 could see average premium hikes of 75% or more.​

​​He had a warning for Republicans, calling this looming mass expiration of health insurance subsidies a “self-inflicted wound” for the party. “They were elected on solving affordability,” he pointed out, and now they’re going to accelerate the problem. But Driscoll said no side is blameless. “The tragic thing is, neither side really wants to have a sensible conversation about how do you really care for more people and get them better care earlier.”

In similar countries, roughly 50%-60% of doctors are primary care, but it’s only one in four in the U.S. The problem is that every doctor wants to be a specialist or a surgeon because they’ll roughly double the salary of a pediatrician or internist that way. “Until you change those incentives people are going to keep going towards those higher compensated areas.”

There’s no one fix to this, but there are steps we could take, Driscoll said. He pointed to expanded drug‑price negotiation, immigration reforms to ease shortages of primary‑care doctors and nurses, “site‑neutral” payment so patients aren’t charged more for identical hospital‑based care, and broader use of value‑based and bundled payment models. But we don’t even seem to be capable of engagement, he argued.

“If the two sides could talk,” Driscoll said, “there probably is a way that they could agree on how to to bridge the difference between what Biden and Trump want to do on drug costs. If we could talk, we could probably agree on how to bring back value-based care that would balance the interests of doctors and hospitals and and patients’ outcomes and the government’s obligation.” If only.

At his sentencing hearing in New York, the judge chastised Kwon, suggesting he had succumbed to the worst elements of an industry known for get-rich-quick swindles. “You have been bitten by the crypto bug and I don’t think that’s changed. You must be incapacitated. If not for your guilty plea, my sentence would have been higher,” said U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, according to a tweet from Inner City Press, which provides reliable reporting on court proceedings. 

The sentencing is the final fallout from 2022, when Kwon’s stablecoins TerraUSD and Luna both suddenly collapsed in value, which led to massive losses for investors. Kwon was charged with committing wire fraud and conspiring to commit securities fraud and commodities fraud, according to a statement by the Department of Justice. 

After his company went bankrupt in 2022, Kwon was on the run for months. He fled South Korea and later Singapore after he was wanted by both the United States and South Korea. He was arrested in March 2023 in Montenegro after he was found in possession of a fake Costa Rican passport. Late last year, Montenegro extradited Kwon to the United States. 

In a 2024 suit by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulator found Terraform and Kwon liable for civil fraud. A jury then determined that Kwon and Terraform misled investors. Kwon and Terraform lied about how the company’s blockchain technology was using Chai, a Korean payment application, to make transactions. Kwon and Terraform had also claimed that the stablecoin was algorithmically pegged to the US dollar, which jurors found to be misleading to investors. 

Kwon agreed to pay more than $200 million and Terraform agreed to pay more than $3.5 billion in order to wind down the firm. 

In August, Kwon pleaded guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud. “I knowingly agreed with others to defraud, and did in fact defraud, purchasers of cryptocurrencies issued by my company, Terraform Labs,” Kwon said at the time. “What I did was wrong and I want to apologize for my conduct. I take full responsibility.” 

Kwon is one of several high profile crypto figures sentenced to jail in the last couple of years. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March of last year. A month later, Changpeng Zhao, co-founder Binance, was sentenced to four months in prison. President Donald Trump has since pardoned Zhao, while Bankman-Fried remains behind bars.