Anticlimax because the first robot hyped up the entrance of the second robot. It was emotionaly conveying that “hey you think these groovy movements are great? Check out this guy.” But once it become clear that the next guy is just a dumb statue it deflated. How lively the first one was made the second one that much worse in context. A step back.

That is the emotional fail. But perhaps you don’t care about that. Think about what additional message the stage presence of the second robot conveys. The first robot estabilished that they can make a smooth robot. They drove home that the robot is usually autonomous, but in any way it is not pupetted by a guy in a motion tracking suit. The presentation covered how the robots will be used, who will be the first pilot costumer, how will it be introduced and how will it be manufactured. These are all great answers to a concern someone from the audience might have.

But what is the concern to which the second robot is the answer for? Did you doubt even for a second their ability to make the same robot you can already see on the stage but in blue? Because i didn’t. Not before they shown the static demonstration. If they just said “we are working on a production optimised, and streamlined v2” i would have totaly accepted that they can do it.

The only message the second non-working robot communicates is that they are having trouble with their production model. They couldn’t even make it stand in one spot and wave politely! Something is cooked with it and badly. It adds nothing positive to the message of the presentation while introduces the very visible sign that something is wrong.

Now, do I think they won’t be able to solve the problems eventually? Of course not. Heck maybe it will be up and running within days. But why show something which is not working? It is such an unforced error. The first robot could have just done the dance then pointed at the screen and then walked out and nothing would have been less about the whole presentation.

# Initial robot tai-chis towards the right of the video

# This is a stage act that "cues up" the second robot

# One can expect that this "ta-da" moment will have the presented robot do something

# Instead, the presented robot stands there doing nothing

# We have statues that are hundreds of years old easily accessible. Hence a new statue is not interesting

>"We just couldn't pry the actual production samples out of our engineers hands at the lab this week. "

sounds like "Our CEO ordered samples to be shipped but those pesky engineers just wouldnt do it guys!"

>"Um, so we're going to be showing you videos"

Except they didnt even show videos, just some bad CGI aka "We rented this huge ass auditorium to show you our pet. Golden elephant is currently in our basement, he is tired right now so instead look at all those cool drawings my nephew made"!

People seem to misunderstand how easy it is to build a humanoid robot and how hard it is to program robots in general. Even if you build a humanoid robot that is perfectly general purpose mechanically, you will still need to program it like a computer that just happens to have arms and legs.

And for now; who knows if it can fold laundry, literally the only demos we get is dancing and marial arts, 2 things I could not care less about. I want my house painted in whatever hot weather (painters don't work in the summer here because too hot), laundry picked up, stairs cleaned etc. I don't need a 100k robot doing Korean dances.

But I think this 56 DoF might be more interesting than whatever the consumer product will be, as the consumer products seem to be vastly worse even than the industrial ones and both had 'sketchy' demos of doing very simple tasks (slow, parkinson like, many takes, often with someone controlling it with vr glasses and controller).

Thus far I see no evidence that robot manipulation will come together by 2036, let alone 2026.

I don't see how that squares with the ramp-up and QC issues that are well-documented at this point.