You should take both of those announcements with a huge dollop of salt. Even the article you shared is extremely skeptical of the actual progress of Tesla's robot. And Chinese press releases should really not be read into too much - they are often much more for internal signalling then information.
Either way, there are companies which are much farther along than those - Boston Dynamics has a series of extremely impressive robots. They are still very far away from being a consumer technology. The kinds of physical power required to achieve the movements makes them extremely dangerous to be around on any malfunction or glitch, and they are very heavy machinery. Even animals and other humans, which are far more advanced in terms of their ability to control their movements, sometimes accidentally hurt others (stepping on your toes, turning around and hitting you when they didn't know you're there, etc.). Imagine a several hundred kilo machine stepping on your toes with its full weight just because it mis-estimated your movements.
I'm aware that Tesla tends to be over-optimistic in its timeline regarding AI and robotics. I do not endorse the estimates without question and yes, some other companies might have made more progress than they did. The citations were meant as examples of the development in the domain. (And Boston Dynamics doesn't seem to plan a consumer launch of a humanoid robot any time soon, so I didn't cite them.)
What made me more optimistic these days are recent progress in multimodal large foundation models which allow robots to perform much better, esp on manual manipulation. See demo from Sep 2023 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2vj0WcvH5c&t=18s&ab_channel...
Oops, I significantly exaggerated the weight, thanks for finding that.
Still, 60kg is no laughing matter.
Also, isn't the fact that companies which are way further along in developing robot capabilities are not thinking about wide-scale commercialization decent evidence for it not being viable yet?
A rumor in some articles I read suggests that Boston Dynamics robots might actually use less AI compared to Tesla Bots. This is attributed to their origin in more traditional robot control systems research. Some of the impressive choreographies showcased in their videos were, at least in part, orchestrated by their engineers. This implies that these robots may not perform as effectively in unpredictable and partial information environments, such as the real world.
In contrast, the technology behind Tesla Bots is rooted in its research into AI for self-driving cars, which is designed to work well in unpredictable real-world situations.
I'm not aware of any public confirmation of this rumor though.
Either way, there are companies which are much farther along than those - Boston Dynamics has a series of extremely impressive robots. They are still very far away from being a consumer technology. The kinds of physical power required to achieve the movements makes them extremely dangerous to be around on any malfunction or glitch, and they are very heavy machinery. Even animals and other humans, which are far more advanced in terms of their ability to control their movements, sometimes accidentally hurt others (stepping on your toes, turning around and hitting you when they didn't know you're there, etc.). Imagine a several hundred kilo machine stepping on your toes with its full weight just because it mis-estimated your movements.