How should we think about the labor substitution narrative responsibly?

[mohammed64]

That's the official framing, at least - reality tends to lag a bit. Chinese humanoid startups reportedly accounted for around 65% of deal volume in 2025, while US companies still won the largest individual rounds, with at least three raises exceeding $400 million - deal count and deal size tell different stories depending on which region you're looking at.

[tariqlarsen]

@mohammed64 Agreed, and I'd add: Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) - subscription, leasing, or usage-based pricing instead of outright purchase - is emerging specifically to lower the adoption barrier for businesses that don't want to commit large capital expenditure to an unproven new category.

[barbara.jones]

@tariqlarsen This raises a question for me - A recurring critique worth taking seriously: a lot of publicly announced 'production capacity' targets (100k units/year, 1 million/year by 2028, etc.) are aspirational manufacturing targets, not confirmed sales or deployment numbers, and the gap between the two has historically been large in hardware industries.

[carter42]

@barbara.jones From what I've seen: Insurance and liability frameworks for humanoids working directly around people are still immature in most jurisdictions, which is a real, under-discussed constraint on deployment speed that gets far less attention than the flashier technology headlines. Anyway, good thread - following for more.