Google's Deep Mind AI Unit announcing a new partnership with Boston Dynamics as robotics

takes center stage at CES this year. Dear Durbosa, digging into that on today's tech,

we knew this was going to be the year of the robots, Deirdre. We certainly did. It's interesting

to contrast to last year, right? It was all about AI in theory, and this year, robotics is starting to put AI into physical form. So that's what it's all about.

There's lots of fun demos like this one from Boston Dynamics showing off its next generation Atlas robot, now paired with Google's AI.

Now, to be clear, this demo was teleoperated, but it does show you where we're headed. The form factor,

as you see, it's humanoid, but as the executives put it, it builds on nature. So you've got

fully rotational joints built to operate in heat, cold, rain, real industrial environments. But what

really stood out to us was the intelligence behind it. This idea that this robot can actually

learn a new task, like walking itself over to a charging station and swapping its own battery,

and then pass that skill onto other robots. And that's really key, because it means that once

you have the form factor down, improvements come through software and the AI that powers

the back end.

So that may be where the real race is in 2026, even though it's fun to look at all the different

humanoid robots.

When you see videos of China's unitary robots, for example, which are arguably a lot more

impressive.

Look at this.

Flips roundhouse kicks.

And they're also moving towards

commercialization faster. It's easy to focus on the hardware, but ultimately this may be less

about who can build the robot and where the biggest companies are placing their bets.

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