Nah. What's often overlooked when seeing these (mostly) propaganda events is the fact that the actual autonomy of these machines is still lacking.
We've had purpose-built machines that outperform every human at specific tasks for over a century now. Just because a subset that's popular these days (the "humanoid" and dog-like variants) invoke some psychological and cultural (we've been primed by media for over 150 years at this point) fears, doesn't make them more capable than they seem.
Sure, the thing can run real fast, but looking at it, that's pretty much all it actually can do. In contrast to a boring old industrial robot, though, being able to win a half-marathon or a 100m dash against any hypothetical human isn't all that useful, no?
Of course it's still lacking. In contrast, how long does it take for a human to go from birth to being able to break any world records? How many years of dedication just to hone themself for that particular thing? And is a human breaking a record any more "useful" than a machine breaking it?
Once you lay down the coolaid for a second you'd realize that the whole point of the human experience has little to do with its "usefulness". But you'd have to redo your civic education and maybe socialize first for that to finally hit.
Ah, someone who doesn't have a valid argument but feels compelled to argue anyway, and so resorts to personal attacks. I know, it sucks to be in such a position. But you'll feel better once you accept reality. Buck up.
Ah, someone who doesn't have a valid argument but feels compelled to retort anyway, and so resorts to vague-posting about some higher-level point they supposedly hold. Drink up.
Given its form factor there is already a ton of active research into developments that would be just about plug and play. Hands with coordination for example.
True. Physical capabilities can be added with ease. The actual problem isn't the actuators anymore, though. Very useful for a remote controlled puppet ala "Surrogates" (the film), still not quite there yet when it comes to performing even simple tasks autonomously.
Emptying a washing machine located in the cellar/basement, taking the clothes to a room on the ground floor, folding and sorting them before putting them in the closet still is quite the challenge.
Wirelessly hooking such robot up to a data centre running heavy machine learning models isn't a proper solution either, because in contrast to digital agents, latency matters quite a bit in physical interactions.
I'm ready since I was born. I'm including the times when people were better than machines at anything into Middle Ages. I hope I'll live long enough so I can see civilization finally exit them.
You won't be outperformed in humanity. And that's precisely the point. People will start rejecting AI and robots en masse, because they'll get disgusted by it, the same way you are disgusted when eating a "powder shake" kind of meal compared to a whole, earthy, flavorful, home-made meal
Workers hated the factories of the Industrial Revolution but the masses also wanted those sweet sweet high quality textiles that were tighter knit and lasted longer than anything handspun. The same will happen for AI.
Also, further counterpoint, if we reject industrial produced food, who spent $139 billion at McDonald’s in 2025?
BTW I consumed Soylent regularly for several years while living in the US and was never "disgusted" by it. Would love to get my hands on some now as it's been so long. You should watch your arguments.
Not at all. In this case a completely false argument was made, one which was immediately obvious to me because something that I had positive experience with was referenced in an all encompassing negative light.
If people were rejecting them en masse now we might have a chance to reverse this
As it stands I am not hopeful. I believe the frog will be well and truly boiled long before we reach the rejection en masse stage and it will be too late to change course
I keep reading about these things in the news, and they are nice marketing stance. But I still wonder how far we are away from humanoid robots being commonplace in every day life. I don't share the fear some seem to have towards robots, just because a world filled with robots was something I dreamed of as kid. But I still wonder about the cost and feasibility of robot police officers, or cashiers etc.
Anybody that has to work with the public and is toward the bottom of the economic totem pole has a bit of the shit end of the stick tbf. Has to be an absolutely crushing feeling, especially if they don't see a way to college or if they've lost faith in the institution or degree.
To clarify I am describing the difference in my experiences with service workers over the past 20 years.
It's true that the zoomers got the shit end of the stick, economically and culturally. It's also true that they are literally paid to be polite and still refuse to do so.
Just because you're going through the apocalypse doesn't mean you gotta take it out on everybody else. That's like rule #1.
As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, that was not the case. I worked plenty of such jobs and it was 'fine' - most people were nice, a few were jerks, a few were above and beyond nice. It was really not so bad, and in many ways preferable from a human interaction standpoint to working at a big tech company, especially post-RTO mania
> As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, that was not the case.
Yep. A lot happened since then!
- 9/11
- 2008 recession
- 20+ years of warfare
- Student Debt Crisis
- Housing Crisis
- COVID
- Now Venezuela, Iran War, Cuba on the on-deck spot
- Tariffs massively increasing costs of goods
You're talking about 25-36 years ago. I remember all of it.
Gen Z has a much higher debt burden per degree, they have a much higher home price-to-income ratio, much higher baseline living costs, and they are socially and culturally vastly different from the people in charge in this country right now. Now they're dealing with AI pushing down both wages and the number of positions, especially entry level ones.
For sure, Gen Z and Gen A are royally fucked - I did not mean to imply that they don't have it bad as far as generations go. I just meant I don't particularly think it is "interfacing with the public" that is the problem. I don't think people are fundamentally different - I think the system has broken any semblance of fairness or opportunity or optimism for the future.
How many times/long can it do that before being recharged? Can it do other walking and mobility tasks?
The headline by itself doesn't really mean much, anyone can build a purpose-built robot to beat specific human limitations. The question is can it have that kind of performance without completely foregoing most other tasks and abilities.
I agree there, but IMO these are problems that can be fairly easily solved.
My bigger problem is that this is labelled as "humanoid robot". IMO that is more like some machine gadget that looks very remotely like some non-descript model of a humanoid, but not anything at all like a humanoid robot. I am a bit spoiled by Blade Runner here - these robots right now come nowhere close to anything like that right now, even if they run faster than Usain Bolt (but they run differently, so they are cheating; look at the angles, the tiny feet, the cheating in the hip area, the barely existing head - so many things are CHEATING here. I can not call this humanoid robot).
There's a good chance that most humanoid robots are not going to look particularly hunan.
You might have different proportions due to different weight distribution or use cases (maybe the legs are made less flexible if the workspace has fewer obstables, for example.
Maybe "bipedal" is a better descriptor, since wheels are a proven way to go faster than Usain Bolt, but walking-style strides are new.
> anyone can build a purpose-built robot to beat specific human limitations
Anyone could build a robot that could run on two legs at that speed for 100m? I think someone would have done it before. Even the other robots in the race were slower.
Why would they when we can already far exceed humans with other methods of locomotion? I don't see high jumping huminoid robots either despite it being even easier to implement.
If you're going to compare mechanical things to humans, Google tells me a Top Fuel Dragster could do it in about 1.9 seconds, finishing at about 320 kph or so.
Machines using fossil fuels have been able to do more than men or beast for centuries now.
It's my impression that the killer robot industry has focused primarily on dog-shaped robots over human. Being bipedal gave us a lot of advantages, but "incredibly fast runner" isn't one of them.
Usain Bolt is incredibly fast for a human, but cheetahs are twice as fast still (and, presumably, can climb stairs too).
I do appreciate the engineering achievement on its own, but there seems to be an implied "and will replace humans" vibe here that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
What's next: Waiting patiently, as the perfect sniper.
First hiking 10 miles into enemy territory. Then laying down in low-power mode, for 120 days. Finally waiting for "important enemy person" to pass by, and then using a weapon with super-human sensory skills + weaponry. Note - Does not need to be humanoid.
We need to start Waging Peace, as our ability to kill each other is outstripping our willingness to live peacefully together.
Totally. In a little while, you might even be able to marry a robot and even raise robot kids.
What a time to be alive indeed!
I highly doubt that that it will happen. But just mocking the celebration of paving a path towards the death of all things that makes being a human worth all the pain..
> the death of all things that makes being a human worth all the pain
I'd say that's the problem. There are people who think humans are uniquely special/purposed, and AI is systematically destroying that notion. They need to wake up, or they may find themselves jumping off a bridge or something.
Feelings are ultimately electrical patterns in the brain, just like everything else humans experience. And as such they can be manipulated and reproduced in any sufficiently capable brain-substrate. Only a matter of time before machines that can feel also become a thing, and then what's left?
There was nothing about causation here. Cause would be stimuli triggering memories, biased by the collective experience from past interactions and... DNA. Far more -ologies than I've studied involved.
No, what I meant is that just because we observe signals in the brain when we feel something, it does not mean that the "feeling" is caused by the signals.
What would the cause be then? Actually how do you define the concept of "feeling"? Like when someone sees someone they "love", for example, is there more to it than the stimuli leading to the recognition of that person as such, which triggers a release of chemicals that cause the heart to race and the associative chain reaction recorded by the brain... is there more to it than that, particularly some quality we aren't able to measure and potentially manipulate?
I don't know. We know that the physical changes happening in brain cannot be the cause of the sensations that we experience.
Because dreams. If the physical changes in brain is the cause of the sensation of vision, then how can we see things in dream without the exact physical changes happening in the brain that could have caused it when awake?
What this tells me is that there is something (consciousness?) that just "measures"
the brain activity, and constructs a sensation from the measurements, and thus sense it. This thing is also capable of constructing the sensation without the measurements, which makes dreams possible..
How does it work? Not a clue. But the point is that the physical changes in the brain cannot be solely responsible for our sensations.
My contacts at various factories and my own eyes after touring said factories tell me that the assembly lines have been mostly run by programmed (no quotes required, just SPS) robots for the past 50 years or so.
Welcome back to the 1970s I guess?
The ones I see deployed in construction do stuff like drilling holes in hard to reach places, or laying bricks. None of them look like people, though. Much like the typical household dishwasher hasn't been named Alice or Doris for the past 50+ years, but rather Bosch or Samsung and doesn't use actual hands.
But yeah, humanoid robots do look cool and many movies and books told us to be fearful of them.
I don't see the difference. Is a humanoid robot not a machine? What surprises is that it took so long to achieve this. It took Honda 20 years to get to ASIMO in 2000. I'm not surprised by the fact that 26(!) years later, a humanoid robot finally exceeds human capabilities in basic tasks like running.
Such robot would easily smash the current marathon record as well and the only thing I'd be impressed by, would be the battery capacity tbh.
If you were ever trapped on the top floor of a burning building, should we just send a car up there?
Nobody is surprised by advancement like this, but there is still a lot of engineering that went into it, not talking about how it’s now almost consumer grade tech that you can buy.
> If you were ever trapped on the top floor of a burning building, should we just send a car up there?
Riddle me this then: what role does a robot that has been built to run real fast play in that scenario?
Sure, a good deal of engineering went into this, but the hard part - solving bipedal locomotion - had been done long before that. Apart from showing off it's not really advancing the field and so there's not too much left to be impressed by (honestly, the battery and actuator efficiency that allowed the thing to do a half marathon was MUCH more impressive, at least to me). It seems to me to be more analogous to car tuning.
The thing has no real arms, hands or carry capacity, so what would be the point?
Running up the stairs is the easy part after all. The difficult part in such scenario is lack of orientation due to smoke, obstacles like locked doors or fallen debris, unstable walls and ceilings, locating people and getting them out safely. All of those things require a good amount of autonomy, on-the-spot physical problem solving and judgement.
To this effect, the recent DARPA Triage Challenge, which has its final taking place in November this year, seems like a much more thorough and practical demonstration of current capabilities. Something to look forward to if you're interested in the current state-of-the-art w.r.t. real-world applications of robotics.
Everyone has the same basic objective and measurement norm, so we can see how performance improves year over year, and how different manufacturers handle a specific known goal, even if it's not super-representative of real world use cases.
Billion-dollar supercomputers don't spend most of their time running LINPACK, and some probably perform better on specific tasks, but it doesn't make the Top 500 list any less of a thing.
Why would you call it "humanoid"? Can you qualify this? Because I came to the conclusion that this is NOT a humanoid robot. Having one rectangle and four long spear-like things, does not make something "humanoid". So which criteria do you use?
I think of "humanoid" as a machine capable of operating in the same complex physical environment as humans do. For instance, it is generally more comfortable for a healthy adult human to use a steep staircase than a steep ramp. So a "humanoid" robot would be capable of using the same staircase instead of requiring a ramp to be purpose-built just for it.
> A machine is stronger and faster than a human? Shocking. Next we'll learn that cranes can lift heavy loads faster than a human with ropes and pullys.
It’s funny how absurdly dismissive and condescending tech people can be about difficult problems in other people’s fields that they know absolutely nothing about. Numerous developers, informed by maybe a YouTube video, Reddit thread, or equally misguided explainer post on another developer’s blog, have tried to ‘correct’ me about topics in a field in which I hold a degree and have plenty of professional experience. Other tech people might be impressed because they have matching blind spots in their mental models of the world, but people who actually understand, rather than baselessly assuming they understand, see someone being smug about their own ignorance.
Sorry, your uninformed opinion doesn’t match expertise. Correctness isn’t democratic. Glib bullshit is glib bullshit no matter how vested you are in the ego that it’s stroking.
> It’s funny how absurdly dismissive and condescending tech people can be about difficult problems in other people’s fields that they know absolutely nothing about
"Machines can do stuff humans cannot do" isn't exactly groundbreaking in 2026.
The only interesting part of this story is that this particular machine form factor looks pretty much like a human
It's still not exactly shocking news that it can outrun a human. Of course it can. We're well past John Henry vs the Machine at this point in history
> The only interesting part of this story is that this particular machine form factor looks pretty much like a human
That's the whole goddamn point of this. Fast stable autonomous bipedal locomotion was out of reach of human technology for decades. Since this year it isn't. This was impossible year ago, despite all of the achievements of humanity, cumulative, till the year 2025, included. Now it isn't.
"Being needed" is a poor choice of source of existential happiness and contentment though. Sure, it's an easy and accessible one for the masses with some mental gymnastics around how you view your income generating activities (or by having kids). But it's still dependent on others, as you need them being at hand to impact. See all the needless depression arising from kids moving out, or when people retire and complain about not being needed instead of finding new activities to explore or grow in.
As for the fear of human labour not being needed at scale due to me as most others needing an income, I'm optimistic there for two reasons. First, large unfed masses tend to start revolutions, something both governments and the not-working are interested in avoiding. Second, large amounts of young idle people has tended to result in stupid destructive behaviour at scale. So I'm confident there will be created opportunities for paid work for mostly everyone, and the conditions won't be too poor as there would be no profit motive to push people too far. Rather, the people having both the resources, time, and energy to consume, would still be what props up the system (until we can agree on trying something better now that we have excellent tools for guaranteeing transparency and optimising allocation at scale in real time).
> "Being needed" is a poor choice of source of existential happiness and contentment though
This has nothing to do with existential happiness or contentment
It is about existential fear that if I am no longer needed then there's nothing useful I can provide to earn an income. At best I wind up living a destitute existence or homeless, at worst I wind up being executed by murderbots owned by rich people to reduce the risk that I might take action against them
> As for the fear of human labour not being needed at scale due to me as most others needing an income, I'm optimistic there for two reasons. First, large unfed masses tend to start revolutions, something both governments and the not-working are interested in avoiding.
In the past governments and rich people still needed working people's labor to keep their lifestyles. In a fully automated world that's no longer the case. I am very confident that if the ruling class of society could slaughter all of us and still maintain their lifestyles forever they would in a heartbeat. Foolishly, we are delivering that possibility to them in the form of automation.
Did this thing travel thru a time portal and ask for a boots, clothes sunglasses and motorcycle too? this stuff seems to be evolving very quickly now. wasnt that long ago these things were legs only with cables and bunch of humans holding it.
All the snarky comments about cars or other vehicles doing it faster seem to miss the point that none of these attempt to mimic/improve on the running movements of humans... but I guess you do you, this is an impressive robotics feat in my oponion.
It would've been impressive 15 years ago. People seem to forget that first humanoid robot capable of competently walking was showcased by Honda 26 years ago.
over 20 years ago, the updated version was capable of running and climbing stairs.
So a purpose-built (look at the thing - running is all it can actually do) two legged fast running robot doesn't seem all that impressive today. Cool? Sure! Useful? Not so much. Impressive? Whatever... it's just showing off at this point, much like Boston Dynamic's Atlas series that went nowhere (in contrast to this machine: this one did half marathon distance:)
Well - in a way this is nice, just for documented record, even though a bit useless too.
However had, I watched it, and I have some problems here.
First: these robots have barely any head. I think for a humanoid robot, you need
to have a proper head with some weight in relation to the rest, otherwise it is
just SIMULATING being humanoid. Then the feet; this is also a problem. Specifically
the feet are not like human feet at all, they are more like stubs or elongated stubs with push-back being made-super easy. Usain Bolt does not have such short jokes of feet, so this comparison is unfair. Same with the hip area - I am sorry, but the hip structure of these robots is ABSOLUTELY not at all like a human. I am not even calling these humanoids.
Don't get me wrong, it is good that science and technology progresses and such robots may do things that robots solely with a wheel alone, may be unable to do, such as running, climbing, you name it. But I simply can not call them "humanoid". They are, IMO, simply not humanoid and not even humanoid-like.
For "proper" science fiction, have a look at the first Blade Runner movie, but also the first terminator. Initially Cameron thought Arnold was unfit because he was massive and the infiltrating cyborg should melt into the environment easily (which was better in Terminator 2, T1000 was kind of more "logical", but I hated the background storyline in Terminator 2, it made no sense to me, no clue why people preferred that over the original terminator movie). I am aware that these running robots don't aim to be a look-alike replacement, but they simply also should not be called humanoid robots right now. They simply are not humanoid. Thus one should not call them that way.
I'm so tired of my messages taking 2 weeks to deliver! 3000km shouldn't take that long! Personally I'm really looking forward to a world where my message can take maybe even a week to deliver to someone 2000km - 3000km away. What a time to be alive.
Its a nice demo of advances, but its not hugely significant in the way some comments here make it out to be. We have had machines faster than humans for a long time. We have had animals faster than humans for longer than there have been humans.
> We have had machines faster than humans for a long time
Yes it is true that we have had machines on rubber wheels that can move very fast on open roadways. But these new machines are also capable of walking up and down stairs, navigating obstacles, using doorways, and generally operating in the same complex spaces that humans do.
I’m much more interested in seeing a robot with excellent fine motor control. A robot folding a piece of tissue paper without ripping it would be more impressive to me than this robot or the backflip robot.
If this Silicon Valley forum is full of people denying the achievement, and the US goverment is banning the technology and competition, I expect the engineers and scientists in China will pull much further ahead.
The US is behaving like an industry incumbent, like Blackberry when the iPhone came out. That the US could fall behind on technology seems to have not crossed many minds. It will be very hard to overcome that first mover advantage.
It’s the distance rather than the speed that is impressive.
Or, to be more accurate, the distance at that speed.
Because, of course the machine which does not tire and is deliberately designed to be durable and exceed natural human tolerances are better than humans. Cranes can lift far more than the strongest man.
But I understand that historically, bipedal machines have had balancing issues. The number of slight adjustments needed are significant. And doing it while at that speed and also not tumbling over is an achievement.
The live stream was here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOVNn1aRAIE
Watching robot after robot being taken away on a stretcher was pretty funny.
There will be no escape. Prepare to be outperformed in all the things.
Nah. What's often overlooked when seeing these (mostly) propaganda events is the fact that the actual autonomy of these machines is still lacking.
We've had purpose-built machines that outperform every human at specific tasks for over a century now. Just because a subset that's popular these days (the "humanoid" and dog-like variants) invoke some psychological and cultural (we've been primed by media for over 150 years at this point) fears, doesn't make them more capable than they seem.
Sure, the thing can run real fast, but looking at it, that's pretty much all it actually can do. In contrast to a boring old industrial robot, though, being able to win a half-marathon or a 100m dash against any hypothetical human isn't all that useful, no?
Of course it's still lacking. In contrast, how long does it take for a human to go from birth to being able to break any world records? How many years of dedication just to hone themself for that particular thing? And is a human breaking a record any more "useful" than a machine breaking it?
Once you lay down the coolaid for a second you'd realize that the whole point of the human experience has little to do with its "usefulness". But you'd have to redo your civic education and maybe socialize first for that to finally hit.
Ah, someone who doesn't have a valid argument but feels compelled to argue anyway, and so resorts to personal attacks. I know, it sucks to be in such a position. But you'll feel better once you accept reality. Buck up.
Ah, someone who doesn't have a valid argument but feels compelled to retort anyway, and so resorts to vague-posting about some higher-level point they supposedly hold. Drink up.
Given its form factor there is already a ton of active research into developments that would be just about plug and play. Hands with coordination for example.
True. Physical capabilities can be added with ease. The actual problem isn't the actuators anymore, though. Very useful for a remote controlled puppet ala "Surrogates" (the film), still not quite there yet when it comes to performing even simple tasks autonomously.
Emptying a washing machine located in the cellar/basement, taking the clothes to a room on the ground floor, folding and sorting them before putting them in the closet still is quite the challenge.
Wirelessly hooking such robot up to a data centre running heavy machine learning models isn't a proper solution either, because in contrast to digital agents, latency matters quite a bit in physical interactions.
My bar is the Kilian Jornet test. Once a humanoid robot can do everything he’s done within the same time constraints it’s officially over.
Until then human is the best at navigating and moving across various terrain.
Not in feeling emotions.
Until someone creates a machine that does feel emotions.
I'm ready since I was born. I'm including the times when people were better than machines at anything into Middle Ages. I hope I'll live long enough so I can see civilization finally exit them.
You won't be outperformed in humanity. And that's precisely the point. People will start rejecting AI and robots en masse, because they'll get disgusted by it, the same way you are disgusted when eating a "powder shake" kind of meal compared to a whole, earthy, flavorful, home-made meal
Workers hated the factories of the Industrial Revolution but the masses also wanted those sweet sweet high quality textiles that were tighter knit and lasted longer than anything handspun. The same will happen for AI.
Also, further counterpoint, if we reject industrial produced food, who spent $139 billion at McDonald’s in 2025?
"who spent $139B at McDonald's"
perhaps in the US, sure, you guys are weird
But in Europe, McDonalds is a drop in the bucket compared to all the rest of the restaurants. People DO prefer real stuff
> humanity
What does that even mean?
BTW I consumed Soylent regularly for several years while living in the US and was never "disgusted" by it. Would love to get my hands on some now as it's been so long. You should watch your arguments.
What does "watch your arguments" even mean? It's just "Dont say anything I disagree with" with a threatening tone.
Not at all. In this case a completely false argument was made, one which was immediately obvious to me because something that I had positive experience with was referenced in an all encompassing negative light.
Why bother asking a question you already have your preferred straw man answer to?
For many humans "watch your arguments" carries the same tone as "pay attention to those boxes you're standing on".
A reasonable assumption here would be the GP questioning the assumed universal truth of:
If people were rejecting them en masse now we might have a chance to reverse this
As it stands I am not hopeful. I believe the frog will be well and truly boiled long before we reach the rejection en masse stage and it will be too late to change course
That's what she said
I keep reading about these things in the news, and they are nice marketing stance. But I still wonder how far we are away from humanoid robots being commonplace in every day life. I don't share the fear some seem to have towards robots, just because a world filled with robots was something I dreamed of as kid. But I still wonder about the cost and feasibility of robot police officers, or cashiers etc.
I'd be fine with it if they were alive. If not, no.
Those Chinese robot demos show more signs of life than zoomer service workers
Anybody that has to work with the public and is toward the bottom of the economic totem pole has a bit of the shit end of the stick tbf. Has to be an absolutely crushing feeling, especially if they don't see a way to college or if they've lost faith in the institution or degree.
To clarify I am describing the difference in my experiences with service workers over the past 20 years.
It's true that the zoomers got the shit end of the stick, economically and culturally. It's also true that they are literally paid to be polite and still refuse to do so.
Just because you're going through the apocalypse doesn't mean you gotta take it out on everybody else. That's like rule #1.
As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, that was not the case. I worked plenty of such jobs and it was 'fine' - most people were nice, a few were jerks, a few were above and beyond nice. It was really not so bad, and in many ways preferable from a human interaction standpoint to working at a big tech company, especially post-RTO mania
> As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, that was not the case.
Yep. A lot happened since then!
- 9/11
- 2008 recession
- 20+ years of warfare
- Student Debt Crisis
- Housing Crisis
- COVID
- Now Venezuela, Iran War, Cuba on the on-deck spot
- Tariffs massively increasing costs of goods
You're talking about 25-36 years ago. I remember all of it.
Gen Z has a much higher debt burden per degree, they have a much higher home price-to-income ratio, much higher baseline living costs, and they are socially and culturally vastly different from the people in charge in this country right now. Now they're dealing with AI pushing down both wages and the number of positions, especially entry level ones.
It's no fucking wonder!
For sure, Gen Z and Gen A are royally fucked - I did not mean to imply that they don't have it bad as far as generations go. I just meant I don't particularly think it is "interfacing with the public" that is the problem. I don't think people are fundamentally different - I think the system has broken any semblance of fairness or opportunity or optimism for the future.
How many times/long can it do that before being recharged? Can it do other walking and mobility tasks?
The headline by itself doesn't really mean much, anyone can build a purpose-built robot to beat specific human limitations. The question is can it have that kind of performance without completely foregoing most other tasks and abilities.
> How many times/long can it do that before being recharged? Can it do other walking and mobility tasks?
You should ask those questions in the same spirit re a 1 vs a 5 vs a 20 year old. May lead to some insight on development-level-based capability.
I agree there, but IMO these are problems that can be fairly easily solved.
My bigger problem is that this is labelled as "humanoid robot". IMO that is more like some machine gadget that looks very remotely like some non-descript model of a humanoid, but not anything at all like a humanoid robot. I am a bit spoiled by Blade Runner here - these robots right now come nowhere close to anything like that right now, even if they run faster than Usain Bolt (but they run differently, so they are cheating; look at the angles, the tiny feet, the cheating in the hip area, the barely existing head - so many things are CHEATING here. I can not call this humanoid robot).
There's a good chance that most humanoid robots are not going to look particularly hunan.
You might have different proportions due to different weight distribution or use cases (maybe the legs are made less flexible if the workspace has fewer obstables, for example.
Maybe "bipedal" is a better descriptor, since wheels are a proven way to go faster than Usain Bolt, but walking-style strides are new.
> anyone can build a purpose-built robot to beat specific human limitations
Anyone could build a robot that could run on two legs at that speed for 100m? I think someone would have done it before. Even the other robots in the race were slower.
Why would they when we can already far exceed humans with other methods of locomotion? I don't see high jumping huminoid robots either despite it being even easier to implement.
There actually were high-jumping robots in the Olympics (I skimmed the livestream),
https://youtu.be/SOVNn1aRAIE?t=5087
Now climb a mountain with your wheeled robot. (You can't.)
Your bipedal one might be able to walk or run or jump up there though.
> I don't see high jumping
They did high jump in this very same contest.
If you're going to compare mechanical things to humans, Google tells me a Top Fuel Dragster could do it in about 1.9 seconds, finishing at about 320 kph or so.
Machines using fossil fuels have been able to do more than men or beast for centuries now.
i totally agree. I read this and was like i bet the prius in my driveway could do it a lot faster too, who cares.
Stop moving the goalposts. This is a bipedal robot. I want to see a top fuel dragster accomplish the same running on two legs.
For the first second or so, a dragster is only on 2 wheels ;-)
It's crazy how these records are just quietly being broken by humanoid robots. What's next? What a time to be alive.
> What's next?
Killer robots which can't be outrun and which can give chase through urban landscapes
> What a time to be alive
Indeed.
It's my impression that the killer robot industry has focused primarily on dog-shaped robots over human. Being bipedal gave us a lot of advantages, but "incredibly fast runner" isn't one of them.
Usain Bolt is incredibly fast for a human, but cheetahs are twice as fast still (and, presumably, can climb stairs too).
I do appreciate the engineering achievement on its own, but there seems to be an implied "and will replace humans" vibe here that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
What's next: Waiting patiently, as the perfect sniper.
First hiking 10 miles into enemy territory. Then laying down in low-power mode, for 120 days. Finally waiting for "important enemy person" to pass by, and then using a weapon with super-human sensory skills + weaponry. Note - Does not need to be humanoid.
We need to start Waging Peace, as our ability to kill each other is outstripping our willingness to live peacefully together.
>What a time to be alive.
Totally. In a little while, you might even be able to marry a robot and even raise robot kids.
What a time to be alive indeed!
I highly doubt that that it will happen. But just mocking the celebration of paving a path towards the death of all things that makes being a human worth all the pain..
> the death of all things that makes being a human worth all the pain
I'd say that's the problem. There are people who think humans are uniquely special/purposed, and AI is systematically destroying that notion. They need to wake up, or they may find themselves jumping off a bridge or something.
Humans are special because they can feel. You know what it means to "feel", right?
Feelings are ultimately electrical patterns in the brain, just like everything else humans experience. And as such they can be manipulated and reproduced in any sufficiently capable brain-substrate. Only a matter of time before machines that can feel also become a thing, and then what's left?
>Feelings are ultimately electrical patterns in the brain
Correlation =/= causation.
There was nothing about causation here. Cause would be stimuli triggering memories, biased by the collective experience from past interactions and... DNA. Far more -ologies than I've studied involved.
No, what I meant is that just because we observe signals in the brain when we feel something, it does not mean that the "feeling" is caused by the signals.
What would the cause be then? Actually how do you define the concept of "feeling"? Like when someone sees someone they "love", for example, is there more to it than the stimuli leading to the recognition of that person as such, which triggers a release of chemicals that cause the heart to race and the associative chain reaction recorded by the brain... is there more to it than that, particularly some quality we aren't able to measure and potentially manipulate?
>What would the cause be then?
I don't know. We know that the physical changes happening in brain cannot be the cause of the sensations that we experience.
Because dreams. If the physical changes in brain is the cause of the sensation of vision, then how can we see things in dream without the exact physical changes happening in the brain that could have caused it when awake?
What this tells me is that there is something (consciousness?) that just "measures" the brain activity, and constructs a sensation from the measurements, and thus sense it. This thing is also capable of constructing the sensation without the measurements, which makes dreams possible..
How does it work? Not a clue. But the point is that the physical changes in the brain cannot be solely responsible for our sensations.
> all things that makes being a human worth all the pain
Running fast or jumping high are what makes being a human worth all the pain?
Yknow, for a tech news aggregation website, some of you really hate technology
Do you think people on hackernews should embrace every use of technology?
Technology isn’t a single unified thing.
People can like GPS while disliking nuclear weapons without any contradiction.
I dislike the vast waste of resources happening during the current AI bubble, and don’t really care about generative AI.
Horses are faster than humans. I don't see them suddenly taking over based on that fact alone.
You can't "program" a horse to do construction or assembly line jobs, can you?
My contacts at various factories and my own eyes after touring said factories tell me that the assembly lines have been mostly run by programmed (no quotes required, just SPS) robots for the past 50 years or so. Welcome back to the 1970s I guess?
The ones I see deployed in construction do stuff like drilling holes in hard to reach places, or laying bricks. None of them look like people, though. Much like the typical household dishwasher hasn't been named Alice or Doris for the past 50+ years, but rather Bosch or Samsung and doesn't use actual hands.
But yeah, humanoid robots do look cool and many movies and books told us to be fearful of them.
A machine is stronger and faster than a human? Shocking. Next we'll learn that cranes can lift heavy loads faster than a human with ropes and pulleys.
a bullet is faster than any car. the point is, it's a humanoid type robot, not just a faster vehicle.
I don't see the difference. Is a humanoid robot not a machine? What surprises is that it took so long to achieve this. It took Honda 20 years to get to ASIMO in 2000. I'm not surprised by the fact that 26(!) years later, a humanoid robot finally exceeds human capabilities in basic tasks like running.
Such robot would easily smash the current marathon record as well and the only thing I'd be impressed by, would be the battery capacity tbh.
But not all machines are the same?
If you were ever trapped on the top floor of a burning building, should we just send a car up there?
Nobody is surprised by advancement like this, but there is still a lot of engineering that went into it, not talking about how it’s now almost consumer grade tech that you can buy.
> If you were ever trapped on the top floor of a burning building, should we just send a car up there?
Riddle me this then: what role does a robot that has been built to run real fast play in that scenario?
Sure, a good deal of engineering went into this, but the hard part - solving bipedal locomotion - had been done long before that. Apart from showing off it's not really advancing the field and so there's not too much left to be impressed by (honestly, the battery and actuator efficiency that allowed the thing to do a half marathon was MUCH more impressive, at least to me). It seems to me to be more analogous to car tuning.
> what role does a robot that has been built to run real fast play in that scenario?
It will run real fast up the stairs, I guess? Is it a good enough riddle?
The thing has no real arms, hands or carry capacity, so what would be the point?
Running up the stairs is the easy part after all. The difficult part in such scenario is lack of orientation due to smoke, obstacles like locked doors or fallen debris, unstable walls and ceilings, locating people and getting them out safely. All of those things require a good amount of autonomy, on-the-spot physical problem solving and judgement.
To this effect, the recent DARPA Triage Challenge, which has its final taking place in November this year, seems like a much more thorough and practical demonstration of current capabilities. Something to look forward to if you're interested in the current state-of-the-art w.r.t. real-world applications of robotics.
If I'm trapped in a burning building and am at the top floor, send a helicopter, dude. The robot will be fine on the way back (maybe) bu I won't!
What people find impressive or interesting is subjective, I guess.
Absolutely. I was impressed by ASIMO and Atlas. Running fast, though, doesn't seem all that impressive by comparison, but yeah YMMV.
It's a very pretty benchmark.
Everyone has the same basic objective and measurement norm, so we can see how performance improves year over year, and how different manufacturers handle a specific known goal, even if it's not super-representative of real world use cases.
Billion-dollar supercomputers don't spend most of their time running LINPACK, and some probably perform better on specific tasks, but it doesn't make the Top 500 list any less of a thing.
Why would you call it "humanoid"? Can you qualify this? Because I came to the conclusion that this is NOT a humanoid robot. Having one rectangle and four long spear-like things, does not make something "humanoid". So which criteria do you use?
Per the article
> Lightning the humanoid robot clocks 9.32sec in Beijing
Bipedal, hips, knees, feet. Looks humanoid to me.
If cloudflare puts this in a grid of images and asks me to pick the humanoids, I’m clicking it
yea people will look for any reason to disagree. It's right in the article.
I think of "humanoid" as a machine capable of operating in the same complex physical environment as humans do. For instance, it is generally more comfortable for a healthy adult human to use a steep staircase than a steep ramp. So a "humanoid" robot would be capable of using the same staircase instead of requiring a ramp to be purpose-built just for it.
it is of humanoid shape
>> a humanoid robot that can competently run
> A machine is stronger and faster than a human? Shocking. Next we'll learn that cranes can lift heavy loads faster than a human with ropes and pullys.
It’s funny how absurdly dismissive and condescending tech people can be about difficult problems in other people’s fields that they know absolutely nothing about. Numerous developers, informed by maybe a YouTube video, Reddit thread, or equally misguided explainer post on another developer’s blog, have tried to ‘correct’ me about topics in a field in which I hold a degree and have plenty of professional experience. Other tech people might be impressed because they have matching blind spots in their mental models of the world, but people who actually understand, rather than baselessly assuming they understand, see someone being smug about their own ignorance.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease
Stop being so proud of your degree. People see the world the way they want to, and your lectures aren't going to change that.
Sorry, your uninformed opinion doesn’t match expertise. Correctness isn’t democratic. Glib bullshit is glib bullshit no matter how vested you are in the ego that it’s stroking.
> It’s funny how absurdly dismissive and condescending tech people can be about difficult problems in other people’s fields that they know absolutely nothing about
"Machines can do stuff humans cannot do" isn't exactly groundbreaking in 2026.
The only interesting part of this story is that this particular machine form factor looks pretty much like a human
It's still not exactly shocking news that it can outrun a human. Of course it can. We're well past John Henry vs the Machine at this point in history
Not that it looks like a human — that it basically is structured like a human skeletal system. It’s an incredible technical accomplishment.
> The only interesting part of this story is that this particular machine form factor looks pretty much like a human
That's the whole goddamn point of this. Fast stable autonomous bipedal locomotion was out of reach of human technology for decades. Since this year it isn't. This was impossible year ago, despite all of the achievements of humanity, cumulative, till the year 2025, included. Now it isn't.
I think tech like this is accelerating us into extinction, So forgive me if I don't exactly celebrate
"That's the whole point" that we don't need humans anymore?
Great. I'm a human. You want me to celebrate? No thanks
"Being needed" is a poor choice of source of existential happiness and contentment though. Sure, it's an easy and accessible one for the masses with some mental gymnastics around how you view your income generating activities (or by having kids). But it's still dependent on others, as you need them being at hand to impact. See all the needless depression arising from kids moving out, or when people retire and complain about not being needed instead of finding new activities to explore or grow in.
As for the fear of human labour not being needed at scale due to me as most others needing an income, I'm optimistic there for two reasons. First, large unfed masses tend to start revolutions, something both governments and the not-working are interested in avoiding. Second, large amounts of young idle people has tended to result in stupid destructive behaviour at scale. So I'm confident there will be created opportunities for paid work for mostly everyone, and the conditions won't be too poor as there would be no profit motive to push people too far. Rather, the people having both the resources, time, and energy to consume, would still be what props up the system (until we can agree on trying something better now that we have excellent tools for guaranteeing transparency and optimising allocation at scale in real time).
> "Being needed" is a poor choice of source of existential happiness and contentment though
This has nothing to do with existential happiness or contentment
It is about existential fear that if I am no longer needed then there's nothing useful I can provide to earn an income. At best I wind up living a destitute existence or homeless, at worst I wind up being executed by murderbots owned by rich people to reduce the risk that I might take action against them
> As for the fear of human labour not being needed at scale due to me as most others needing an income, I'm optimistic there for two reasons. First, large unfed masses tend to start revolutions, something both governments and the not-working are interested in avoiding.
In the past governments and rich people still needed working people's labor to keep their lifestyles. In a fully automated world that's no longer the case. I am very confident that if the ruling class of society could slaughter all of us and still maintain their lifestyles forever they would in a heartbeat. Foolishly, we are delivering that possibility to them in the form of automation.
It's fine to not be happy about it, but denying what's happening is a completely different thing.
Usain Volt
Usain Nuts and Bolts
Did this thing travel thru a time portal and ask for a boots, clothes sunglasses and motorcycle too? this stuff seems to be evolving very quickly now. wasnt that long ago these things were legs only with cables and bunch of humans holding it.
All the snarky comments about cars or other vehicles doing it faster seem to miss the point that none of these attempt to mimic/improve on the running movements of humans... but I guess you do you, this is an impressive robotics feat in my oponion.
It would've been impressive 15 years ago. People seem to forget that first humanoid robot capable of competently walking was showcased by Honda 26 years ago. over 20 years ago, the updated version was capable of running and climbing stairs.
So a purpose-built (look at the thing - running is all it can actually do) two legged fast running robot doesn't seem all that impressive today. Cool? Sure! Useful? Not so much. Impressive? Whatever... it's just showing off at this point, much like Boston Dynamic's Atlas series that went nowhere (in contrast to this machine: this one did half marathon distance:)
We've been seeing humanoid robots walking, jumping, climbing stairs for at least a decade.
Nice, but can it outrun Tom Cruise?
It's cheating. Make it start from the crouch start.
Robo Olympics?
Humans on enhancements vs robots?
They ran so fast that most of them crashed into pieces in the end.
Well - in a way this is nice, just for documented record, even though a bit useless too.
However had, I watched it, and I have some problems here.
First: these robots have barely any head. I think for a humanoid robot, you need to have a proper head with some weight in relation to the rest, otherwise it is just SIMULATING being humanoid. Then the feet; this is also a problem. Specifically the feet are not like human feet at all, they are more like stubs or elongated stubs with push-back being made-super easy. Usain Bolt does not have such short jokes of feet, so this comparison is unfair. Same with the hip area - I am sorry, but the hip structure of these robots is ABSOLUTELY not at all like a human. I am not even calling these humanoids.
Don't get me wrong, it is good that science and technology progresses and such robots may do things that robots solely with a wheel alone, may be unable to do, such as running, climbing, you name it. But I simply can not call them "humanoid". They are, IMO, simply not humanoid and not even humanoid-like.
For "proper" science fiction, have a look at the first Blade Runner movie, but also the first terminator. Initially Cameron thought Arnold was unfit because he was massive and the infiltrating cyborg should melt into the environment easily (which was better in Terminator 2, T1000 was kind of more "logical", but I hated the background storyline in Terminator 2, it made no sense to me, no clue why people preferred that over the original terminator movie). I am aware that these running robots don't aim to be a look-alike replacement, but they simply also should not be called humanoid robots right now. They simply are not humanoid. Thus one should not call them that way.
This is super exciting for fast message delivery.
I'm so tired of my messages taking 2 weeks to deliver! 3000km shouldn't take that long! Personally I'm really looking forward to a world where my message can take maybe even a week to deliver to someone 2000km - 3000km away. What a time to be alive.
Try radio.
Sir, why would I put on a "radio" when I've got a perfectly healthy pigeon, readied and waiting?
Its a nice demo of advances, but its not hugely significant in the way some comments here make it out to be. We have had machines faster than humans for a long time. We have had animals faster than humans for longer than there have been humans.
> We have had machines faster than humans for a long time
Yes it is true that we have had machines on rubber wheels that can move very fast on open roadways. But these new machines are also capable of walking up and down stairs, navigating obstacles, using doorways, and generally operating in the same complex spaces that humans do.
Now apparently they can run really fast too.
Yes, but these robots can presumably go where wheels can't
I’m much more interested in seeing a robot with excellent fine motor control. A robot folding a piece of tissue paper without ripping it would be more impressive to me than this robot or the backflip robot.
In other news, my Corolla also travels faster than Usain Bolt.
Both robots were carried away on stretcher afterwards…
I'm not impressed if you are gonna compare a strength and pretty 1D dex of a machine to a human.
Robot Wars with government funding and a coat of paint? Ok then.
If this Silicon Valley forum is full of people denying the achievement, and the US goverment is banning the technology and competition, I expect the engineers and scientists in China will pull much further ahead.
The US is behaving like an industry incumbent, like Blackberry when the iPhone came out. That the US could fall behind on technology seems to have not crossed many minds. It will be very hard to overcome that first mover advantage.
> If this Silicon Valley forum There are people from all over the planet hre.
More like "If this forum created by a guy from Silicon Valley..."
True, but I think it's still centered very much on SV. For example, those Chinese engineers aren't here.
Robots are human, too. Ah, wait. Never mind.
It’s the distance rather than the speed that is impressive.
Or, to be more accurate, the distance at that speed.
Because, of course the machine which does not tire and is deliberately designed to be durable and exceed natural human tolerances are better than humans. Cranes can lift far more than the strongest man.
But I understand that historically, bipedal machines have had balancing issues. The number of slight adjustments needed are significant. And doing it while at that speed and also not tumbling over is an achievement.
One day that robot will invent the wheel
I don't want to alarm people but I hear they now have automobiles that can outrun humans.