The New Robotics ‘Arms Race’: Who Can Do the Craziest Hype Video?

A couple months ago, a humanoid robot was dispatched to the top of Ecuador’s Mount Chimborazo, the surface point farthest from the center of the planet. It was a stunt arranged by Geologic Dome, a nonprofit that uses AI and robotics for nature conservation, which had obtained the robot from the robotics arm of Virtuals Protocol, a crypto startup.

Along with the robot, Geologic Dome sent a videographer, who hauled up three cameras to shoot clips the nonprofit could use to promote its cause. One clip shows the robot, clad in a purple winter coat and black mittens, plodding over the snowy peak. In other footage, it dances its heart out to a swing tune.

Though these clips might give the impression that robots can now rival humans when it comes to mountaineering, the robot had significant help in scaling Mount Chimborazo. A squad of flesh-and-blood people took turns carrying the 70-pound machine for much of the four-day trek to the summit. “We were 10 people, and I think six finished the expedition with back problems,” said Geologic Dome founder Pablo Berlanga Boemare, laughing.

By relying on a robot for promotional oomph, Geologic Dome found itself caught up in a trend happening all across the robotics boom. Companies seeking to stand out in the increasingly crowded field are creating ever wilder videos packed with stunt-filled antics. These videos rely on careful editing and concerted off-screen preparation to present the robots in the best possible light—oftentimes leaving viewers with the perception that the robots are more capable than they really are.

Marketing is obviously a cornerstone for nearly every business. But for many robotics startups, promotional videos are all they have now—and likely for the foreseeable future—to drive interest. Even as more than $8 billion in venture funding has flooded the industry so far this year, most humanoid makers are at least years—if not a decade—away from actually selling any robots that could drive meaningful revenue. Still, the development of the technology is very costly, so in the absence of real revenue, they must rely on videos of their prototypes to maintain buzz and anticipation around their companies and to give themselves a chance of raising more money.

“It’s an arms race to get the better video that’s gonna get people excited, and then you can raise more money,” said Ken Goldberg, co-founder of industrial robotics company Ambi Robotics and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. However, viewers should beware the exaggerated claims these videos make.

“I call it video emptor,” said Goldberg.

Some of the most dramatic videos come from Chinese robotics companies and circulate widely on U.S. social media, contributing to the sense that America is lagging behind China in the field. One such example: Unitree has shown its humanoid pull off a back flip, a side flip and a spinning back kick to destroy a watermelon. And just earlier this week, Unitree released a video of a humanoid leaping 6.5 feet in the air, higher than the human world record—by less than a foot. (Three days later, the company debuted on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, raising $905 million.)

American robotics firms have been hurriedly keeping pace. Tesla, for instance, has released videos of its Optimus humanoid dancing, serving snacks, catching tennis balls out of the air and sitting in a sauna holding an iPhone. This year, Boston Dynamics, a longtime fan of dramatic demonstration videos, released a video of its humanoid robot, Atlas, learning to perform a roundoff back handspring, a gymnastics feat.

Perhaps no U.S. robotics firm has been more prodigious in the production of hype videos than Figure AI, which is also one of the most highly valued robotics startups. It has shown its robots putting away groceries in a kitchen, playing fetch with a dog and working in a BMW factory, all set to pulsing techno music. Figure has also been one of the sector’s more prodigious fundraisers, collecting more than $2 billion of investment over the past three years, according to PitchBook.

The footage looks neat but has attracted plenty of critics who argue that the videos oversell the robots’ capabilities and their commercial traction.

In response to a heckler’s challenge on social media to show an autonomous 8-hour work shift, Figure livestreamed one of its robots placing packages barcode-side down on a conveyor belt for 200 consecutive hours. As part of the exercise, the company made one 8-hour shift a competition, arranging for a showdown between the robot and one of the company’s flesh-and-blood interns. The intern edged out a narrow victory, which Figure CEO Brett Adcock declared was “the last time a human will ever win.”

Congrats to Aime!! He said his left forearm is basically broken 😂 Final scores:
→ F.03: 12,732 packages (2.83 seconds/package)
→ Aime: 12,924 packages (2.79 seconds/package) This is the last time a human will ever win pic.twitter.com/CalDzPZz4d

Some robotics companies present the ordinary as the extraordinary in their videos, “playing on the fact that people don’t know what robots are already capable of,” said Brad Porter, founder and CEO of Cobot, which is developing robots for warehouses and hospitals. Many robots have been doing impressive work in factories for years. “There are robots that lift up thousands of pounds inside a manufacturing facility or put a big roll of paper into a paper mill,” he said.

Skild AI, which develops AI models to power robots, earlier this year showed a video of robot arms placing components on a circuit board. “That was nothing new,” said Porter, but people reacted like, “‘Oh, my God, that’s so smooth and polished.’ Well, that is how robot arms look, if you’ve been paying any attention over the last 20 years. So I kind of joked that I’m like, ‘Man, if Elon showed how many robots he’s using to build cars, people’s minds would be blown.’”

Skild CEO Deepak Pathak defended the demonstration when I asked him about the video. He said their AI-powered robots are many times cheaper and faster to install compared to traditional robots working on semiconductors—and noted that they can handle random variation that would foil a traditional robot.

Viewers of these videos often get the impression that robots are more capable than they are. Part of the reason for that is that humanoids are designed to look like they can complete any task a person can do. And casual viewers also don’t have a sense of what tasks are hard or easy for a robot. If you saw a person that could perform gymnastics, karate and other athletic feats, it would be reasonable to assume that person could also do something as simple as peel an orange—but tasks requiring dexterous manipulation still tend to elude today’s best humanoids.

Many of the tricks that often go into robot videos have become open secrets in the industry. For example, sometimes humans are remotely controlling the robot behind the scenes, though it looks like it is operating autonomously, or a video is played at a higher speed to make a robot look faster than it is. 1X Technologies released a video last year of its humanoid robot Neo performing house chores, but it relied on a human puppeteer behind the scenes.

As viewers have grown wise to some of these cinematic sleights of hand, other robotics companies have recently sought to distinguish themselves by being as realistic and honest about their robots as possible. Physical Intelligence, a startup founded mostly by academic roboticists, duct-taped an iPhone to the ceiling to record one of its robots in action. Boston Dynamics, for its part, released blooper reels, showing its robots falling over and dropping items.

Robotics videos receive so much scrutiny that some companies “want to be as honest and transparent as possible,” said Fawna Xiao, head of production and managing director for creative consultancy Across the Pond, which has worked with several prominent robotics clients. “They want to show the real thing. They realize that there’s so many flashy videos out there that sometimes showing the actual robot as it is is more powerful,” she said.

For example, in a video Across the Pond recorded showcasing Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics 1.5 AI model, the robot uses a pair of pincherlike grippers to place an apple, a banana and a lime onto red, yellow and green plates according to the corresponding fruit color. “Although this example seems very simple, the idea behind it is really powerful,” says Google researcher Jie Tan in the video. “The same model is going to power more-sophisticated robots, like humanoids.”

While some robotics companies have shown off their robots’ ability to recover from a hard shove without falling down, K-Scale Labs in 2025 showed its robot falling on its face and breaking after the company’s CEO kicked it from behind. “I’m more comfortable with the storytelling that is naturally trying to tell the real story and not necessarily trying to create an illusion,” said Morgan Schmidt-Feng, the filmmaker who created that trailer.

Still, the naturalistic approach wasn’t enough to save K-Scale Labs. Four months after releasing that video, the company went out of business.