According to a report from Semafor, it sounds like the C-suite at Boston Dynamics—the company that made the original creepy walking robot videos—has come under a bit of a strain as Hyundai, the Korean automaker that bought a majority stake in Boston Dynamics in 2021, demands a huge manufacturing surge.
Earlier this year at CES, Boston Dynamics and Hyundai showed off a startlingly capable new update to its Atlas series of robot prototypes that, it claimed, had a production-ready version all set to be manufactured in “a new robotics factory capable of producing 30,000 Atlas robots a year.”
Then in February, as Semafor notes, Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter retired. Then for whatever reason the CTO and CFO left. Semafor’s anonymous sources are former employees, apparently, and they claim that group of executives was forced out. Additional departures have apparently included senior researchers and engineers. The board of directors is reportedly concerned that competitors—Tesla probably among them—are nipping at their heels. The former employees say Hyundai is pressuring Boston Dynamics to generate “tens of thousands” of robots in the next few years for its automotive plants.
In that context, it’s interesting to watch Atlas project general manager Zachary Jackowski, who was one of the company leaders onstage at CES, on the podcast Automated last month. In that interview he talks about Playter’s departure, the retirement of the Atlas research robot, and the transition to making a sellable Atlas product:
Jackowski compares general purpose humanoid robots to LLMs. In terms reminiscent of what you might hear from an Openclaw productivity enthusiast, he talks about how thanks to LLMs, “the lid just got blown off software engineering and software in general.” He adds, “We’re seeing the same thing in robotics. The magic is the generality.”
In Semafor’s phrasing, Boston Dynamics is “under pressure to speed the delivery of working humanoids to Hyundai.” The CES presentation promised the capability to make 30,000 in one year, and it sounds like that’s what Hyundai wants to see as soon as possible. Boston Dynamics is reportedly making four Atlas robots per month as it figures out how to ramp up large-scale manufacturing.
The company’s statement to Semafor about the changes within the company focuses on scaling up production, and reads in part, “These changes are designed to help us prepare for the next chapter of Boston Dynamics, where we will need a structure that supports our ability to mass manufacture robots and rapidly drive scale in this emerging industry.”
