Sanctuary AI: Humanoid Robots Will Hit Homes In 3-7 Years - Yahoo News Singapore

I caught up with James Wells at Web Summit Vancouver this week. Sanctuary is Canada’s only homegrown humanoid robotics company and holds what Wells says is the third-largest IP portfolio in the space globally. What Wells told me just might reframe much of the current humanoid hype cycle.

The home humanoid timeline: “three, five, maybe seven years”

1X, which just kicked off full-scale production of its humanoid robot Neo, is one of the robot makers that have explicitly targeted the home market. In fact, I know someone who has pre-ordered Neo, which is targeted to ship before the end of this year.

I asked Wells point-blank whether 1X's Neo, which is being pre-sold for home deployment now, is doomed. “If you do nothing, you will be forced to buy Chinese robots with AI brains that Canadian business will hire and you will hollow out the entire economy."

The same is true for the United States and pretty much any other modern industrial society.

Humanoid robots’ ChatGPT moment

The big question, whether for industry or home, is when we’ll see the iPhone moment in humanoid robots. Or, the ChatGPT moment: the point in time at which it becomes incredibly obvious that a massive phase shift in technology and capability is happening right now.

There may not just be one, Wells says:

"There’s going to be moments along the way," he said. "Task by task. Unlock a group of tasks, unlock another group of tasks." He didn’t bite the way I expected. "I applaud their marketing initiative," he said, choosing his words with care. "Which is a marketing initiative."

Then he laid out Sanctuary’s internal ranking of deployment environments by viability: unit economics, environment complexity, customer sophistication, safety tolerance. By every axis, the home ranks last on Sanctuary AI’s list. Home gets there eventually, but Wells thinks humanoid robots are at least three to five years out for full commercial viability at performance and cycle times that customers will accept.