The billionaire investors and entrepreneurs at the All in Podcast described 2025 as the year of AI and robots. I, Brian Wang, and Randy Kirk reviewed why and how AI and robots will be transforming the world. Summarizing the key points and claims and providing context.
Dave Frieberg says 2025 is the year when people look at humandoid robots and say OMG.
All four, Calcanis, Chamath, Gavin Baker all agreed about the explosion of AI capability
They also said which companies would be the big winners. (Tesla, xAI, Google).
They are agreeing with predictions that I have been making for months about AI and humanoid robotics.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
I’ve been trying to be a little less optimistic in my own projections, as I regularly tend to think things might happen 1-2 years before they actually do. So maybe I’m now being too pessimistic, but I suspect that while humanoid robots will get even more capable this year, they’ll mostly still not bring a lot of added value, due to some missing factors.
Training – even by watching a video of a human doing a job – is not yet sufficient for many manual human tasks. Maybe toward the end of year it could be, as long as the human in the video doesn’t take certain shortcuts that rely on senses and flexibility the robots don’t yet have. Robots still lack a great deal of human tactile senses – detecting pressure at the finger pads is only the start.
Imagine how you might find the end of a wire, without even looking, by feeling it sliding against the palm of yor hand or fingers – any of them – until you feel the connector, pop it up into your fingers, grasp it, orient it based on your tactile memory of it’s felt shape and the orientation you know you want it to have for the next step in attaching it to something.
Or think of how you might fetch three or four different containers from a shelf, stacking and pinning them in place on your hand, arm, and against your body, feeling the pressure of each so you can keep them stable while picking them up, stacking them, carrying them to a workspace, where you continue to keep them all stable as you deposit them one by one.
Or how you could easily hold a couple of small parts in the palm of your hand while you attach one of them, then without really thinking about it, transfer another from the palm up into your fingers to attach it.
That’s the level of dexterity that human manual tasks take advantage of all the time. You can generally simplify things enough for a robot to achieve the same end goal, just a lot less quickly, which will cut into the potential cost savings. Will robots eventually get so fast that they can do things in a simplified fashion but moving much faster? Probably – but current generation humanoids usually move a bit slower than humans.
So again – I’m trying to be less optimistic, in order to be more realistic on which robots will really start to have job impacts. I’m guessing that won’t be 2025, will be starting in 2026, and maybe around 2027 they’ll be good enough to suddenly ramp up.
Probably the right way for robot makers to get the timing right is to work on having robots build the assembly lines on which robots will do most of the assembly tasks. When the robots get good enough at that to rapidly build out the robot factories, maybe they’ll be ready to not just produce massive numbers, but put them all to use.
Unemployed Office Workers Are Having a Harder Time Finding New Jobs
More than 1.6 million unemployed workers have been job hunting for at least six months—a number that has ballooned by more than 50% in the past two years.
From WSJ,
When I see these AI companies needing billions of dollars in funding to get going It doesnt seem worth it.
Great news for billionaires. Maybe not so much for those who are put out of work.
The Clone Robotics humanoid bot I’ve been seeing looks VERY interesting.
Predictions for Tesla autopilot were false over and over again. I remember articles claiming so big improvements for next autopilot versions in May and June 2024. We have not seen such improvements and it is Jan 2025.
There were also inflated claims that thousands Tesla bots will be send on Mars in 2026. I mean that predictions will be false.
Lots of false predictions on Gigafactories and number or cars. I saw very inflated numbers for quite some time and then it all stopped and the figures plateaued. So I doubt where does mr. Brian get such high prediction score, when there is lots of half truths and inflated numbers.
Not to mention LK 99, which was total miss.
I dont say coverage of Tech is nice on that site, but the numbers are so exaggerated that realistic it should count as false prediction. Score about 60 – 70 % would be more accurate.