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Musk has company. At least three different firms have made new forays into advanced robotics this month — including Amazon (founded by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post); Nvidia; and Atoms, a new startup from Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick whose mission reads: “Physical automation to transform industry and move the world.” Figure, a leading robotics startup, put a humanoid robot in the White House this week that walked the red carpet alongside first lady Melania Trump.

Musk is among a cohort of tech moguls that have seized on humanoid robots, which embody artificial intelligence in corporeal form, to massively transform labor-intensive work that cannot be performed solely by large language models. By applying the technology of the AI race to the physical world, they aim to unlock a new frontier of automation.

With the AI boom transforming office jobs at warp speed, tech moguls see a massive opportunity in replacing manual labor — upending fields that have so far been left untouched. Robot armies would be expensive to build and maintain, but unlike people, the devices would not take a salary. That has tech firms and their investors seeing dollar signs.

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The tactic has led to a popular buzzword in Silicon Valley: “physical AI.” A Nvidia news release this month used the term no fewer than 15 times.

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