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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I've started to wonder why the big AI labs have no robotics yet, and I'm thinking now the reason why we don't see robots is because they want us (the general public) at all costs to not freak out. Imagine what would have happened if we had 6ft tall "friendly" robots marching through the streets, and suddenly the news came about of AI going rogue, like what we've seen from the recent hacks ... I bet it would have been the end of the story for AI labs right away (of course not for AI, because the department of defense would take over).

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> I'm thinking now the reason why we don't see robots is because they want us (the general public) at all costs to not freak out.

Not quite [1]. Your reaction is what's being sought after: to believe it's more powerful and capable than it is to (presumably) keep the cash flowing.

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/09/25/tesla-optimus-production-ramp...

What I'm saying is that there is a limit to how much fear you can instill and still make money from it.

I don't believe for a bit they don't have the humanoid robotic capabilities. They keep claiming they don't have the training data, but it's very easy to generate tons of data using these robots.

I honestly believe they have robots solved and that's why AI CEOs are shitting their pants now, and everybody is wondering what's going on. If they reveal their true capabilities, that's the end of AI labs.

PS: Look at that article you posted. Don't you think it's weird that they have a production line for humanoid robots targeting 20,000 units a week, and meanwhile say "the robots cannot generalize yet".

> I honestly believe they have robots solved and that's why AI CEOs are shitting their pants now, and everybody is wondering what's going on.

Or it's the oodles of money they're on the hook for and subsequent reputation destruction haunting them like the grim reaper.

> Don't you think it's weird that they have a production line for humanoid robots targeting 20,000 units a week, and meanwhile say "the robots cannot generalize yet".

This wouldn't be the first time in history that happened. Lots of companies overshoot capacity being overly-optimistic [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLorean_Motor_Company

> suddenly the news came about of AI going rogue, like what we've seen from the recent hacks

Commented on a story about how these agents didn't go rogue at all, since it's fucking software run by humans, obvious to most of us except the people who freak out.

Someone really needs to be held responsible for the testing that lead to 3rd party infrastructure getting hacked by the software they wrote, using prompts they wrote.

You're reading too much into the words and too little into the meaning. Right now the general public sees those incidents are 'going rogue'. If that happens with robots, no matter if it's the AI lab's fault or not, it will again be spun as rogue AI and will cause the kind of outrage OP mentioned. Imagine if one of the labs deploys a few experimental robots into a city and tells them to "look for suspicious behavior and locate crime" which seems like exactly the kind of thing they would do. When the robots start disfiguring people in the streets so they couldn't escape before the police arrives, of course the first words out of the AI lab will be "this is a misalignment accident, the AI itself went rogue, we're 'so sorry' but we couldn't predict or control this at all".

They do have robotics, it’s just not as far along yet as you might expect looking at their progress in other domains. Look at Figure and Gemini Robotics for good examples of SOTA. They’re impressive, but not ready to be in the streets quite yet, I would guess one more year.

Because LLMs can't do math and don't understand 3D.

If they want to do either, the LLM needs to write programming scripts which takes far too long for every millisecond of movement.

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