Nvidia CEO: Humanoid robot revolution is closer than you think

By Stephen Nellis

SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes humanoid robots are less than five years away from seeing wide use in manufacturing facilities.

Huang on Tuesday gave a keynote address in front of a packed hockey stadium during the nearly $3 trillion company's annual developer conference in San Jose, California.

Huang unveiled software tools that he said would help humanoid robots navigate the world more easily.

Speaking to a group of journalists after the speech, Huang was asked what signs would show that AI had become ubiquitous.

Among other answers, Huang said it may be "when, literally, humanoid robots are wandering around, which is not five years away. This is not five-years-away problem, this is a few-years-away problem."

The manufacturing industry would likely adopt humanoid robots first because that industry has well-defined tasks that robots can handle in a controlled environment, he said. 

"I think it ought to go to factories first. And the reason for that is because the domain is much more guard-railed, and the use case is much more specific," Huang said.

"The value of it is very, very easy to determine. The going rate for renting a human robot is probably $100,000 and I think it's pretty good economics."

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Jose, California; Editing by Stephen Coates)