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- Hacker News
- Wow, Cursor (parent company) gets 60 billion in SpaceX stock. But Boston Dynamics was really purchased for 1 billion by Hyundai over time. That seems way off!by ElijahLynn
- So this appears to mean that Hyundai is effectively taking BD's humanoids "off the market" (B2C/B2B markets). And Softbank wants to take a different humanoids stake in OpenAI's plans.by LanceJones
- If only they could make an engine or transmission that doesn't blow up at 80,000 miles.by travoc
- Luckily they have a 10 year 100k mile warranty.by pixl97
- Hyundai EVs are great though, the Hyundai Ionic 5N is probably the best EV there is (for car enthusiasts).by kristofferR
- So true. I hear they replace more engines than any other brand. I'm surprised they sell so well; a used Toyota would be a far better choice than a new Hyundaiby mikestorrent
- Title really should clarify: Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics
Rest is previously reported stuff.
Related from earlier in the year:
Hyundai Introduces Its Next-Gen Atlas Robot at CES 2026 [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46520508
And old discussions when the intial buy happened:
2020: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363981
2021: Hyundai acquires controlling stake in Boston Dynamics for $880M
- South Korea has the world’s highest manufacturing robot density. 1,220 robots per 10,000 employees in 2024 Growing 7% annually since 2019 (source: IFR)by spqw
- It’s so weird to use an AI generated image for this article when there are so many images of Atlas out there.by SequoiaHope
- And figure out usage and licensing and all that crap. So much easier to just generate a brand new image.by dyauspitr
- The text reads LLM-ish as well.by kaonwarb
- Generating an image from an already open tab is faster than making a search engine query and selecting a good, high resolution image.
Who cares about quality. Speed is the new black.
by bayindirh - Take a step back and look at this article's diction and the rest of this entire website. Completely AI generated.
All those tokens have to go somewhere
by achrono - I still think dumping BD was one of the biggest mistakes of Sundar's career. And that's saying something.by mlmonkey
- 2017 was shortly before Google stopped being afraid of being pegged as an AI killbot company.by gowld
- Yeah. Google was too impatient and forced BD to productize prematurely (Spot, Handle), then dumped them when it didn't work out immediately. AI just wasn't ready yet. Imagine if Google had let BD focus on research until DeepMind was ready with the AI side of things. I think with the right joint research program they could have already been deploying humanoids today.by modeless
- Per this sale, BD is worth $3.25B. Just recently, Google paid $2.7B for two years of Noam Shazeer through the Character.ai deal.
This seems like a small correction if they wanted to reacquire and clearly the market isn't valuing BD all that high.
Why do you think it's one of Sundar's biggest mistake?
by sahila - There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, and they still don't have products out the factory line like they should. I think the tech community has been impressed by their videos, but the fact that their most sold thing is a toy dog at a luxury car price point says a lot about the company.
My personal take is that one of the reasons is their posture against ML. They've been very "GOFCT" and have only recently started to incorporate ML concepts.
- Hyundai bumped their ownership up to 100%, and took the opportunity to reset expectations about when Atlas would be working in Hyundai factories.
While Atlas is the best humanoid robot so far, it still isn't useful in a car factory that's fully equipped with the latest factory robots that are strong enough to juggle car engines and are bolted to the floor.
Everyone knows the killer app for humanoid robots is building the Mars colony amirte?
by Zigurd - There are plenty of tasks a relatively weak humanoid robot is well suited for. Basically any task that is 'human shaped' and not worth an automated line.by idiotsecant
- Wait, haven’t they already owned them for years? Edit: right, they’re just buying the remaining 9%.by tmach32
- I don't think this is solely tied to car manufacturing automation. Even though Hyundai Motor Group is acquiring them, I would imagine they'd be well-positioned to commercialize general-purpose robotics and not just for car manufacturing, if Tesla is anything to go by.
I do think this might be tied to South Korea's demographics, by 2040 the working-age population is projected to decline 25% from 2020 and keep declining almost linearly until leveling out around 17M around 2065, a 50% drop total in < 50 years. I would think HMG / Hyundai sees a huge business opportunity or this might be a national-level political priority but I don't know the specifics.
by sottol - by e12e
- I don't understand why they would implement humanoid robots instead of purpose-built robots. The human form is not the most optimal way to do most tasks, especially as it relates to manufacturing. Robots don't need to look like humans, they need to be useful. Seems like putting in an awful lot of extra unnecessary work to end up with a worse result.by Hugsbox
- I think the rationale is that they are already using typical car factory automation, but they see a huge potential market for general purpose robotics in the coming decades, they don't need the humanoids, they are simply dogfooding a future product.
I think this is smart and not very risky. Tesla is playing a similar game with Optimus, for now Hyundai/Boston Dynamics is at least 5 years ahead.
by stephc_int13 - That's like saying there's no need for a generic CPU. The only way forward is a ASIC. Once a generic CPU does everything well enough, it's extremely versatile.by sgt
- They have god knows how manny bajillion dollars tied up in machinery designed for human use, a human can step in when the robot breaks, and they can buy more robots if the humans get uppity. Those seem like a bunch of good reasons to me.
The humanoid form factor is certainly may not be ideal but I guess they think the flexibility is worth it
- Two things: 1) we have abundant training data for humanoid embodiments (watch humans do things), and 2) the world is already designed for humans.by bigmadshoe
- Custom built robots are expensive (basically an R&D project in themselves) and inflexible, if you want to update the process you have to redesign your automated system. The dream of humanoid robots is they can adapt to new manufacturing processes like human workers.by jrflo
- Humanoidal robots make sense when they need to operate in spaces designed for humans bodies. Cars are designed and built to be used and serviced by humans, especially their interiors so you need humanoid robot to automate building them. Car exteriors are not built for humans to interact with so they are already being built by specialized robots.by terramex