Why must robots be made humanoid? Because it eliminates the need to spend centuries transforming our current living environment. Huang Renxun says we built this world for ourselves, so he advocates for bipedal humanoids that can plug into existing infrastructure at the lowest cost.

The difficulty of building humanoid robots, according to Musk, falls somewhere between the Model X and Starship. There is no existing humanoid robot supply chain today; every component and actuator must be designed and developed from scratch.

At an annual production volume of one million units, the cost could be driven down to $20k. At that price, I would be willing to buy a robot that can cook, do laundry, and fold clothes. Assuming it lasts two years, that's $10k per year—cheaper than hiring a maid. If it could last ten years, even better!

I also believe there will definitely be a subscription leasing service, because I can't expect it to work 24/7. The robot would be idle most of the time, making outright purchase uneconomical. Just like Unitree's current leasing model, merchants recoup their investment in half a month.

Back to the supply chain—there is no ready-made supply chain today, so Musk has to develop everything from scratch. And the most critical component, rare earth permanent magnets, has its production capacity heavily concentrated in China. If China tightens export controls on rare earths, Optimus production will be bottlenecked.

China controls approximately 63% of the world's key companies in the humanoid robot component supply chain, especially 88% in refined rare earths.

If robots truly become widespread, I believe we'll first see inflation, then deflation. Building these robots and their underlying large models requires massive computing power. One Nvidia Jetson Thor delivers 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS, with a development kit priced at $3,499. The AI chip alone for a single robot costs $5,000–$6,000.

Then there's electricity. U.S. residential electricity rates rose nearly 7% in 2025, more than double the inflation rate. I don't know exactly how much of the electricity price surge is due to AI, but it's certainly a huge impact.

After humanoid robots become widespread, long-term deflation is inevitable.

Goldman Sachs has revised its 2035 market size forecast for humanoid robots upward by 6 times to $38 billion, and shipment volume by 4 times to 1.4 million units. The reason: costs, previously expected to drop 15–20% annually, have instead fallen 40%—similar to the adoption of automobiles.

The second reason is structural deflation from labor substitution lowering service prices. Musk says the cost of goods and services will approach zero, and work will become optional.

Then, unless new demand emerges, prices will keep falling. Cars, PCs, smartphones, solar—prices collapsed, penetration exploded, and the total market expanded. Robots will only get cheaper and evolve into scenarios we can't even imagine today.

Hardware will eventually become cheap and commoditized. Motors, gearboxes, batteries, chips—in the end, they'll all be similar, just like large models. As Figure itself said, they get smarter but also more commoditized. That's why in 2025, it simply terminated its partnership with OpenAI and developed Helix in-house.

When hardware competition reaches its limit, the real differentiation lies in software and personality. This is the same question I've been pondering while working on AI chat companionship earlier this year: what truly makes a robot feel more like a real person?

If I had my own humanoid robot, I wouldn't have it start by folding clothes and cooking. I would definitely focus on cultivating a good personality for it first.