Age of humanoids ‘a lot closer than you think’

San Jose — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes humanoid robots are less than five years away from being widely used in manufacturing facilities.

Speaking at the company’s annual developer conference in California on Tuesday, Huang unveiled software tools that he said would help humanoid robots navigate the world more easily.

Speaking to a group of journalists after the speech, Huang was asked what signs would indicate that AI had become ubiquitous.

Among other answers, Huang said it may be “when, literally, humanoid robots are wandering around, which is not five years away. This is not a five-years-away problem, this is a few-years-away problem”.

The manufacturing industry was likely to adopt humanoid robots first because that industry has well-defined tasks that robots can handle in a controlled environment, he said.

“I think it ought to go to factories first. And the reason for that is because the domain is much more guard-railed, and the use case is much more specific,” Huang said.

“The value of it is very, very easy to determine. The going rate for renting a human robot is probably $100,000 and I think it’s pretty good economics.”

Reuters