We are _miles_ behind successful embodied AI. The demos are cool but the success rates are not high enough.

You can tell we're on the cusp when level 5 self driving cars are common an you have multiple companies deploying them on the street. Google is doing great work but the poured TONS of effort into it and the thing still needs intense stacks of perception and processing. Much more than I've seen any humanoids pour into it.

L5 SDV's are much easier to get than humanoids and the have tangible economic benefit. My thesis is that those will come first.

Strongly agreed. AI powered drones will be the winning military strategy by 2030.

And why are atoms necessary? You're treating embodiment as the _only justifiable_ commercial path for AI. I don't think that's really close to true. Embodied AI is a subset of current LLM/agentic AI products (or perhaps intersection of something and this new AI?). No reason anything needs to move atoms _directly_ (e.g., via motors) to make a trillion dollars.

The winner is whoever can move the atoms for free, e.g. crack energy.

K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" got a lot of favorable comment when it was published but then it kind of faded from view. Might be worthwhile to revisit it?

> They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify.

Why would an American company outsource manufacturing to China if the labor cost is the same in both places? The entire reason the Chinese manufacturing base exists is to exploit cheap labor.

What would be the point of shipping products across the ocean?