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Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics
- moondowner 4mo ago`buys` sounds like they have just purchased BD, should be `takes full control` or something similar.
- tmach32 4mo agoWait, haven’t they already owned them for years? Edit: right, they’re just buying the remaining 9%.
- mlmonkey 4mo agoI still think dumping BD was one of the biggest mistakes of Sundar's career. And that's saying something.
- sahila 4mo agoPer this sale, BD is worth $3.25B. Just recently, Google paid $2.7B for two years of Noam Shazeer through the Character.ai deal. This seems like a small correction if they wanted to reacquire and clearly the market isn't valuing BD all that high. Why do you think it's one of Sundar's biggest mistake?
- TheGrassyKnoll 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Shazeer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Shazeer
- Iulioh 4mo agoCan we go on a small tangent and wonder how we don't know when the guy was born?
- dag100 4mo agoIs it really that surprising that no-one has invested the time and effort into figuring out the personal information of some tech employee-turned-founder? I bet no-one outside of tech even knows his name.
- Iulioh 4mo agoA person with an Wikipedia page is not "some tech employee"
- nroets 4mo agoWikipedia shuns primary sources, such as personal websites and company registration documents. They prefer reliable secondary sources such as mainstream news media.
- mlmonkey 4mo agoNot capitalizing on LLMs until OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, and then suddenly everybody was running around like headless chickens is bigger. And then there was Fitbit. Motorola. and more recently, Noam and Character.AI. But imagine: robotics cred of BD combined with AI chops of GDM. It would have been something. Turns out, internally, GDM has robots they're training, experimenting on, etc even today. So why dump BD and lose that platform?
- NitpickLawyer 4mo agoThere's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, and they still don't have products out the factory line like they should. I think the tech community has been impressed by their videos, but the fact that their most sold thing is a toy dog at a luxury car price point says a lot about the company. My personal take is that one of the reasons is their posture against ML. They've been very "GOFCT" and have only recently started to incorporate ML concepts.
- calf 4mo agoWhat is Gofct and does robotics industry generally just have had a slower adoption of ML because of the realtime domain requirements, I'm just curious and wondering aloud here.
- NitpickLawyer 4mo agoSorry, I wanted to make a pun for GOFAI (good old fashioned AI). CT stands for control theory.
- TuringNYC 4mo ago>> There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, Well...there is the uncanny similarity to the T-800 and and uneasy realization that the owner of BD could become Cyberdyne Systems IRL. Perhaps some companies like that notoriety but not sure if many want that. https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/T-800 https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/T-800
- e12e 4mo agoThey already are Cyberdyne Systems IRL? https://en.hyundai-wia.com/business/defense_business.asp https://en.hyundai-wia.com/business/defense_business.asp
- generuso 4mo agoMarc Raibert was a student of Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland had a lot of pull at DARPA. This facilitated the unique prototyping work done at Boston Dynamics to get noticed and supported by DARPA. But as a flip side of this, Boston Dynamics developed certain idiosyncratic interests in getting the hydraulic valves just right, etc. Their machines required a lot of tender care, (expensive!) and were dangerous to be around. When Google acquired them, many things were mismatched. Andy Rubin, the VP at Google who advocated for BD, got fired for alleged sexual misconduct. This cast a shadow on the whole plan that he was trying to implement. DARPA finding did not sit well with Google's ethics. They pushed BD to stop getting grants from DARPA. Expensive and dangerous robots were not an ideal fit for AI experimentation. Google was buying cheap and much safer tabletop robots for that. All in all, there was no good fit, and after spending tons of money on it, Google have gotten rid of them. They did encourage BD to develop a cheaper, safer electric robot, and this became Spot Mini.
- modeless 4mo agoYeah. Google was too impatient and forced BD to productize prematurely (Spot, Handle), then dumped them when it didn't work out immediately. AI just wasn't ready yet. Imagine if Google had let BD focus on research until DeepMind was ready with the AI side of things. I think with the right joint research program they could have already been deploying humanoids today.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- gowld 4mo ago2017 was shortly before Google stopped being afraid of being pegged as an AI killbot company.
- temecula 4mo ago[dead]
- travoc 4mo agoIf only they could make an engine or transmission that doesn't blow up at 80,000 miles.
- pixl97 4mo agoLuckily they have a 10 year 100k mile warranty.
- linksnapzz 4mo ago...which AFAIK isn't transferable. IOW, used Hyundais are cheap for a reason.
- glitchc 4mo agoAre you sure? The warranty is on the car, not the owner. Almost all manufacturers (except Tesla) transfer automatically and are based on mileage.
- linksnapzz 4mo agoWho told you that? Unless you buy your Hyundai new, or CPO from a dealership, the powertrain warranty is 5/50.
- ranger_danger 4mo agoOnly if you happen to be the second owner. Third owners get nothing.
- linksnapzz 4mo agoOf the important life-lessons to have before one turns 18; "don't ever be the third or fourth owner of a Hyundai" is right up there with not eating the yellow snow. There's no shame in being broke, of course-it is merely a catastrophe. The fourth owner of a '11 Sonata is gonna have a different outlook than the fourth owner of a '73 Mercedes 600 Pullman.
- SequoiaHope 4mo agoIt’s so weird to use an AI generated image for this article when there are so many images of Atlas out there.
- bayindirh 4mo agoGenerating an image from an already open tab is faster than making a search engine query and selecting a good, high resolution image. Who cares about quality. Speed is the new black.
- babypuncher 4mo agoand tech companies wonder why consumers hate AI
- s1artibartfast 4mo agoWhat seems to be the problem here? Why is it offensive that someone didnt spend more time hand selecting a picture for the article?
- bayindirh 4mo agoThere's a saying in Zen which I live by. "How you do something is how you do everything". Start to be sloppy somewhere, you'll be sloppy everywhere. As we "learn and enable" to do things faster with less effort, the quality of the thing we (as in humans collectively) do decline. AI, when used as the sole blunt instrument, accelerates this dramatically.
- babypuncher 4mo agoBecause it's not being used to deliver better products, it's being used to flood the market with even more garbage
- LargeWu 4mo agoLetting AI generate your image also dances around the issues of attribution and licensing, for better or worse.
- LanceJones 4mo agoSo this appears to mean that Hyundai is effectively taking BD's humanoids "off the market" (B2C/B2B markets). And Softbank wants to take a different humanoids stake in OpenAI's plans.
- jansan 4mo agoThis is a bit disappointing, isn't it? Boston Dynamics had the coolest robots and everybody was marveling how they would take over the world eventually. Turns out the market isn't gigantic and the use cases are limited, at least for now. However, let's hope they will keep on doing cool stuff under their new owner.
- jeffbee 4mo agoIf it's disappointing then it's been disappointing for over 5 years, since Hyundai has owned the company for 5 years.
- darksim905 4mo agoOutside of some military applications and maybe search and rescue, a lot of people kind of freaked out about Boston Dynamics. They have cool robots, sure, but at what cost if they are implemented by a bad actor? No thanks.
- DennisP 4mo agoI don't think that follows. Hyundai could well sell these after they've dogfooded them for a while. Car factories seem to be a pretty good initial market, given that Tesla is doing Optimus and Figure has humanoids in a BMW factory. But the whole point is that these are general purpose robots, and there are lots of other factories. By the time that market is saturated they'll be capable of more.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 4mo agoTitle really should clarify: Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics Rest is previously reported stuff. Related from earlier in the year: Hyundai Introduces Its Next-Gen Atlas Robot at CES 2026 [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46520508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46520508 And old discussions when the intial buy happened: 2020: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363981 2021: Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588047
- focusgroup0 4mo ago[dead]
- queeshonda 4mo ago[dead]
- androiddrew 4mo agoBoston Dynamics gets passed around again
- dyauspitr 4mo agoNope, Hyundai already owned it, they’re just going to 100%
- Hugsbox 4mo agoI don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful. Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.
- post-it 4mo agoBecause a humanoid robot can replace (theoretically) any human worker, whereas a purpose-built robot can only replace one kind of worker. Or at least that's what Asimov said in Caves of Steel.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- cucumber3732842 4mo agoThey have god knows how manny bajillion dollars tied up in machinery designed for human use, a human can step in when the robot breaks, and they can buy more robots if the humans get uppity. Those seem like a bunch of good reasons to me. The humanoid form factor is certainly may not be ideal but I guess they think the flexibility is worth it
- ACCount37 4mo agoI'm not sure how many times this has to be restated. It's car manufacturing. Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor. What remains unautomated, then? The long tail of tasks that are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity to be offloaded onto traditional robots. This is where this new generation of robotics comes in. This is the kind of task they're designed to do: "a task that's still done by a human in a high automation environment". Universal robots are angling for the tasks that are impossible or uneconomical to automate with traditional industrial robots.
- looperhacks 4mo ago
- Zigurd 4mo agoHyundai bumped their ownership up to 100%, and took the opportunity to reset expectations about when Atlas would be working in Hyundai factories. While Atlas is the best humanoid robot so far, it still isn't useful in a car factory that's fully equipped with the latest factory robots that are strong enough to juggle car engines and are bolted to the floor. Everyone knows the killer app for humanoid robots is building the Mars colony amirte?
- idiotsecant 4mo agoThere are plenty of tasks a relatively weak humanoid robot is well suited for. Basically any task that is 'human shaped' and not worth an automated line.
- whiplash451 4mo ago"weak" in what sense?
- fwipsy 4mo agoIn context, not being able to juggle car engines.
- Iulioh 4mo agoWire harness making is basically a 100% human task now, this is one of the biggest things that would need to get automated but it's a PITA with huge variation and connectors with poor-fish documentation
- bilsbie 4mo agoBD always seemed more like an R&D company to me or even a university lab. Doesn’t seem like a good fit for a car company.
- ms_by_pd 4mo ago[flagged]
- Benlovescnn 4mo ago[flagged]
- giwook 4mo agoBack in December 2020, Hyundai purchased an 80% controlling interest in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank for $880 million, part of a transaction that valued the robotics company at $1.1 billion. That agreement included a put option allowing SoftBank to sell its remaining stake to Hyundai at a later date. SoftBank has now exercised that option.
- Animats 4mo agoOh. It's Softbank exiting humanoid robotics at Softbank's discretion. That's a lot different than " Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics". Hyundai bought them years ago. This is just the last 8%.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoSeems like a mistake. AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people. Not something I would pay for to use outside of work. But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.
- whiplash451 4mo ago> Not something I would pay for to use outside of work You wouldn't but apparently your employer would. I don't disagree with you on robotics, though. For an empire like softbank, not buying an "insurance against the rise of robotics" also seems like a mistake to me. That being said, they may expect robotics to rise through self-driving cars (hence their investment in Wayve).
- fragmede 4mo agoAll of finance is trading money for time. $1 million today vs $100,000 for the next ten years. Softbank needs the money today vs later.
- OtherShrezzing 4mo ago> robot maid that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, etc. would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that. Once you take maintenance of a machine with price-parity to a new car into consideration, it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things. The price needs to fall drastically below new-car territory before it’s competitive with manual human labour.
- SilverElfin 4mo agoBD always felt like they had some awkward demos but never really revolutionized anything. Now they seem far behind Chinese companies. What happened?
- shevis 4mo agoI’m pretty surprised to see no mention of Agility in the conversation about other humanoid companies
- conception 4mo agoJust a note for the thread Hyundai Motor Group makes cars and a lot of other heavy industry things - trains, defense, plant. Rolling robotics fully into their motor group makes complete sense.
- zuzululu 4mo agornteresting part is defense although the economics and power/range limits its practicality. the other timing here is the increasingly belligerent union who are demanding pretty outrageous compensation for what a typical American worker would make. I think the goal is to immediately automate the workforce and move the plants out of korea speaking to insiders.
- rasz 4mo agoWonder if we see Atlas in Ukraine.
- sottol 4mo agoI don't think this is solely tied to car manufacturing automation. Even though Hyundai Motor Group is acquiring them, I would imagine they'd be well-positioned to commercialize general-purpose robotics and not just for car manufacturing, if Tesla is anything to go by. I do think this might be tied to South Korea's demographics, by 2040 the working-age population is projected to decline 25% from 2020 and keep declining almost linearly until leveling out around 17M around 2065, a 50% drop total in < 50 years. I would think HMG / Hyundai sees a huge business opportunity or this might be a national-level political priority but I don't know the specifics.
- e12e 4mo agohttps://en.hyundai-wia.com/business/defense_business.asp https://en.hyundai-wia.com/business/defense_business.asp
- san4mus 4mo agoHyundai could be the first owner that can actually turn BD's robotics in real product
- Lapsa 4mo ago[dead]
- coreyward 4mo agoWarning: AI slop articles ahead.
- mattfrommars 4mo agoI feel Boston Dynamics appears to be doing far more impressive work to be way 'cheaper' then how much Cursor (60b) or Wiz was acquired for (32b)
- shevy-java 4mo agoSkynet does suspicious purchases. The robodog may get new weapons soon.
- spqw 4mo agoSouth Korea has the world’s highest manufacturing robot density. 1,220 robots per 10,000 employees in 2024 Growing 7% annually since 2019 (source: IFR)
- agumonkey 4mo agoI'm stumped such a company was on the market for foreign companies. I thought they had deep ties with US Military Industrial Complex.
- oxqbldpxo 4mo agoThis is by far the best robot available: https://clonerobotics.com/ https://clonerobotics.com/
- johnohara 4mo agoThese kind of stories always make me chuckle. The Boston Dynamics videos always show the humanoid robots running through debris, dancing to the latest music, regaining balance after being assaulted, ever at the ready, ever the obedient servant. Sort of "join the army see the world" kind of stuff. The reality is however, pushing a parts cart to the other side of the factory, returning and doing it again. 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, with time-off to recharge or possibly re-oil. I sincerely hope they're not sentient and unable to communicate it. It would certainly account for the blank stare coming from behind the tinted lenses.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- codingjoe 4mo agoAll I really want to know is if we're getting Mecha suites now to fight Godzilla ;)
- tuptup 4mo ago[dead]
- paulmist 4mo agoCan anyone suggest some ways to understand automation trends in manufacturing? Watching factory tours on youtube has been super interesting.
- moi2388 4mo agoI’m sorry, what is that personal robot going to do for me? Do the laundry for which I already have a machine? Dry my clothes for which I already have a machine? Vacuum clean for which I already have a robot? Cook for which I already have an oven? Do the dishes for which I already have a machine?
- aetherspawn 4mo agoThis article is AI slop and it’s on a news site. How embarrassing.
- xyst 4mo agoHyundai/Genesis vehicles are pretty bad imo. Wonder if they are pivoting to strictly robotics and automation.
- polnurfer 4mo ago[flagged]
- cubano 4mo agoSo if three Tech companies (Boston Dynamics, Google, and Softbank), very smart ones at that, couldn't think of a way to make Atlas profitable, well for sure an automotive company should have no problem at all figuring it out. Huh? I mean...what evidence does the management at Hyundai have that shows them that these things aren't just YouTube stars? What teams does it have in place to start the transition from not profitable?
- qnleigh 4mo ago> Atlas would need to learn new factory tasks in a day or two and reach 99.9% reliability before it could be truly useful on the floor Progress in robotics has been impressive, but is there any evidence that we are approaching this point? How many days are needed to teach a robot a task at even 90% reliability? Given that most companies are still only showing of demos, that number looks to be way more than 2...
- ElijahLynn 4mo agoWow, Cursor (parent company) gets 60 billion in SpaceX stock. But Boston Dynamics was really purchased for 1 billion by Hyundai over time. That seems way off!
- gunapologist99 4mo agoAtlas wrote this article, didn't it?
- jessinra98 4mo ago[dead]
- mokeh8shd 4mo ago[dead]
- mvkel 4mo agoBoston Dynamics has been the dancing robot demo company since its inception. I guess they held out long enough to cash out on a hype cycle. Well played by them.
- lordmoma 4mo agoBoston Dynamics is the same type of cool companies that always demos but never ships.
- Alien1Being 4mo agoChina is leading the world in robotics use in factories. The new Qwen robotics suite is impressive. https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite
- hi_hi 4mo agoWhy do many people seem to think we have solved human robots because of the advances in LLMs? We are still yet to solve 4 wheeled robots navigating a constrained environment. Are we really expecting these things to be let loose _in people’s homes_?!
- quaddoggy 4mo agoLooking forward to a three month wait for my robot to be repaired. Basing this assumption on current vehicular maintenance times.
- tychez 4mo agoExactly. Atlas right now cost about $150,000 in manufacturing cost. The upkeep cost is going to be astronomical for a very long time. The human body gets beat up doing physical work but can self heal. The robot can not. Accidents happen all the time doing work and the robot is not going to be as accurate as a human. I would assume there are zero robot mechanics in the town I live. I think we will just look back at this time as the good ol days during the peak of the bubble when buying a humanoid robot seemed like something on the horizon. I imagine 5 years from now it will feel much further away than it does right now.
- petterroea 4mo agoAm I the only one who feels Boston completely missed their chance and fell behind by being slow on selling robot dogs? Chinese companies were quick to jump in and fill that unfulfilled demand. I work with robots and have never seen a Boston machine irl. Tonnes of Chinese though
- siva7 4mo ago"demand"
- vistawasgreat 4mo agowow
- endofreach 4mo agoHow fucking cool would robohorses instead of cars or bikes be?
- ComputerGuru 4mo agoShame. Boston Dynamics is famous for having a “no using our machines for evil” policy. If you break it (eg mount weapons on their robots, even if you’re a government), they won’t sell to you. Hyundai (the chaebol) has no such policy. They sell their heavy equipment to oppressive regimes to blatantly use in projects and efforts deemed illegal under international humanitarian law and by the International Court of Justice.