Pepper the humanoid robot was born in 2014. It enjoyed a brief wave of hype, including a visit to the Financial Times to meet the editor. “This is a robot that behaves autonomously, powered by love,” declared Masayoshi Son, the head of its main backer, SoftBank. Alibaba and Foxconn also invested hundreds of millions in the effort to make robotics a ubiquitous part of daily life. Yet it was not to be. You still find the occasional Pepper in a public library in Japan, unplugged, its head bowed, like a four-foot tall Pinocchio that dreamt of becoming a real boy but never did. Production halted in 2021 and only 27,000 units were ever made.

Yet the vision of humanoid robots — of machines so like ourselves they can perform all the work we do not want to — is too alluring to abandon for long. The recent, dramatic advances in artificial intelligence have spurred a new wave of enthusiasm for robotics. “The next wave of AI is physical AI. AI that understands the laws of physics, AI that can work among us,” said Jensen Huang, chief executive of chip designer Nvidia, earlier this year. Nvidia has ridden the boom in training AI models to become the world’s second-largest company by market capitalisation.

Billions of dollars in venture capital are pouring into robotics start-ups. They aim to apply the same kind of model training techniques that let computers forecast how a protein will fold or generate startling realistic text. They aim, first, to let robots understand what they see in the physical world, and second, to interact with it naturally, solving the huge programming task embodied in as simple an action as picking up and manipulating an object.