Starting Wednesday, Rohit Prasad, a former Amazon Senior VP and Head Scientist for AI and Alexa will be the new CEO of the Hyundai-owned robot company Boston Dynamics, the company announced on Tuesday.
A Wall Street Journal story about Prasad from 2024 describes how, after being dazzled by the release of ChatGPT, he set about quickly catching up, building internal AI models, and improving Alexa’s chatbot-style features after being placed in charge of a team of thousands. It looks like he’ll be tasked with repeating some version of that story.
Prasad will lead Boston Dynamics during a period when, according to its past statements, it expects to transition at long last from the company that makes unsettling robot videos that go viral to a normal company that accomplishes large-scale humanoid robot manufacturing. Supposedly, Hyundai will then make its army of Boston Dynamics robots do actual industrial work instead of dancing or running really, really fast. (Boston Dynamics made a faster-than-Usain-Bolt robot more than a decade before it was cool).
Earlier this year, Boston Dynamics put on a spectacular humanoid robot performance at CES—making itself look like the sane, stable alternative to Tesla and its outlandish claims. But around that time, the company also reportedly underwent what a Semafor headline described as a “C-suite exodus” amid the resignation of previous CEO Robert Playter. Semafor also claimed in May that Boston Dynamics was only making four of its Atlas humanoid robots per month.
That same month, Boston Dynamics claimed to its investors that by 2028, it planned to manufacture 30,000 humanoid robots, only 5,000 of which would be retail products. Its plan, it said, is for 25,000 to be put to work in its own company’s automotive factories—meaning both Hyundai and Kia. Also, it said in January that Hyundai’s Savannah, Georgia automotive factory will soon be at least partly a robot factory, as well as a place where humanoid robots work in a factory.
But what can an Atlas robot realistically do in a factory? Supposedly a lot. According to a Boston Dynamics press release, one of the robots can reach things up to 7.5 feet high and can lift 110 pounds.
There’s no official quote on a production cost or a final retail price, but according to expert estimates reported by the Korea Herald, it costs somewhere in the range of $130,000 to $140,000 to build an Atlas unit, but once the company has made 50,000 of them (meaning sometime well after 2028) Atlas production will supposedly only cost the company $30,000.
Prasad’s background, it should be noted, is primarily AI, not robotics—though he can at least boast a great deal of experience with AI software built into a physical product. The Boston Dynamics press release emphasizes the concept of “physical AI.” Prasad’s statement reads in part, “Boston Dynamics is uniquely positioned to advance Physical AI through its world-class robotics expertise.”
