I talked to 10+ robotics operators, customers, and investors in the last week.
Here's what I learned:
1/ Roboticists are building robots for themselves, not for the customers.
2/ Physical AI is harder than LLMs. We need way more data, and how we collect data is more important ever.
3/ Humanoids are over-valued. We don't need general robots & human-looking legs for many tasks. People are underestimating the power of building robotics vertically for certain tasks.
4/ People are paying big bucks for ego-centric data. Foundational labs are cutting exclusive deals with data brokers.
5/ There is disagreement as to whether "robotics is a bubble." Some people believe that we overfunded robotics companies. Other people believe that we have not even scratched the surface.
6/ A lot of founders play the VC game (e.g. nice humanoid robot videos to get more funding), rather than understanding the needs of a customer.
7/ Teleop is undervalued and is doing way more work than people admit.
8/ China is eating the component & humanoid stack.
9/ Customers don't care about your robots. They want outcomes cheaper and efficient.
10/ The best robotics teams aren't just pure ML & AI PhDs. They have a weird mix of hybrid backgrouds.
I'm curious what others are seeing on the ground. What am I missing?
someone analyzed all 5000+ accepted papers at ICLR 2026, and it's a good signal who's pushing the research of AI:
> China has surpassed the US with 43.7% of the papers
> Europe's contribution is surprisingly small (5.3% including UK)