visited a few robotics companies + factories in shenzhen last month. a few very unscientific takeaways after seeing things irl: -humanoids are exciting, but still feel early. maybe 5–10 years before we see real mass adoption. a lot of what’s impressive today is still very demo-driven. -near term, i’m probably more bullish on boring robots. robots that are designed to do one/few job(s) really well or special uses cases will get adopted much faster. hotel delivery robots are already everywhere in china and just…work. -data is still a huge bottleneck. but something i found interesting: most companies i talked to don’t really want to buy third party data. they’d rather collect their own because of privacy, quality, and how specific the data needs to be for each use case. -the biggest “oh shit” moment for me was probably the manufacturing side. in shenzhen, you can prototype something, change a component, find another supplier, test it and manufacture it all within this insanely dense ecosystem. it made me wonder: if robotics really becomes the next massive hardware platform, how does the us compete with china on manufacturing and speed of iteration? no strong conclusion yet. still learning. but seeing the physical supply chain in person definitely changed how i think about the robotics race.