The Photon Economy and the Race for Embodied AI
The future of robotics hinges on the ability to navigate the physical world autonomously. Neo, a $20,000 humanoid robot now available for pre-order, represents a significant step toward this goal. Unlike its historical counterpart, the Mechanical Turk, NEO is no hoax—though it still requires human guidance to collect the visual data necessary for genuine autonomy.
Companies like Tesla, Google's Waymo, and Meta are also racing to turn photons into actionable data. Adam Jones argues that "the race for photons has begun," with embodied AI poised to unlock a "deca-trillion TAM." The market for robots capable of autonomous physical interaction dwarfs that of AI confined to digital realms.
Yet a critical challenge remains: AI cannot learn from the physical world without vast amounts of visual data. This bottleneck underscores the immense value of photon-capturing technologies in shaping the next frontier of artificial intelligence.
