Silicon Valley Humanoids Summit Draws 2,000 Attendees as Chinese Firms Dominate Expo

This gathering echoes the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that birthed AI optimism and the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge that jump-started self-driving cars: small, highly technical meetings that later catalyzed billion-dollar races. It sits at the intersection of three long arcs—industrial automation (dating to Ford’s 1913 assembly line), periodic AI hype cycles (expert systems boom-bust of the 1980s, deep-learning boom in the 2010s), and the geopolitical swing of advanced manufacturing from Japan in the 1980s to China today. Whether the summit marks a paradigm shift or another hype crest will depend on converting show-floor demos into safe, profitable, mass-manufactured machines—something no one has yet achieved after a century of robot dreams. If breakthroughs in dexterity and cost follow, the event could be recalled in 2125 as the moment physical AI left the lab; if not, it may be footnoted like the home-robot wave of the 1986 Personal Robot Convention—an ambitious but premature leap.