We'll continue with AI. Our next guest says there will be an explosion of humanoid AI robotics in 2026. SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary joins us now on the cutting edge of both quantum and AI. Jack, happy new year. It's always good to have you. So, what is your prediction?
Happy New Year, David. Good to see you.
Thank you, Jack. Good to see you. What are you predicting here when it comes to our robotic future?
Well, 2026 is going to be an explosive year for AI. First, we're going to see robots hit us in many, many different ways and get on the radar of a lot of investors. Let's start first of all with robo cars. Waymo, we already see the success. Waymo just announced 450,000 paid rides a week. We expect Tesla to try to get to similar numbers by mid to end year. Tesla right now only has 130 robo taxis on the road. Waymo has 2,500 cars on the road. Expect to see Tesla match Waymo's numbers over the next three, four quarters, and I think Waymo will reach a million rides, paid rides a week by Q3 of this year. So, a prediction for you all on that. So, that's one kind of robot. We have to really relook at Tesla as a robotics company, not as a car manufacturer. And the discussion today that people have about how many cars did Tesla sell is actually irrelevant to the future of Tesla. We have to relook at this as a robotics company. So, robo taxi robot cars is one aspect. Look at Waymo. Look at Tesla robo taxis. Now let's look at humanoid robots. If we look at Optimus, if we look at Figure AI on the private side, if we look at the Chinese companies, your colleague was just talking about various companies in China and South Korea. Unitree is an example of a Chinese robotics company. You're going to start seeing robots hit big in B2B first before consumer. The B2B areas that I'm predicting, Sarah and David, are one, logistics and warehouses. If you look at Amazon, Amazon has over a million non-humanoid robots today, right now in their warehouses. They're going to announce this year their use of humanoid robots that will start rolling out this year, next year, and the year after as this scales. And so, expect to see hundreds of thousands eventually of these humanoid robots in the logistics and supply chain area. Also expect to see robots. There's already tests happening in hospitals around the US right now. Not replacing doctors and nurses. Don't worry, robots are not coming into the surgical theater, but they are doing the basic tasks around the hospital of linens, towels, food, sanitizing with UV the rooms to get rid of MRSA, which is a horrible pathogen that kills 100,000 people a year. Robots are better at that job than humans can do. And so we're going to start seeing robots begin to enter the radar this year and start to scale in the two years after that.
Wait, Jack, who's making, you know, Optimus obviously he's talking about still a number of years from now to really have his supply chain going and producing them. So where are they coming from? These robots that you're discussing right now that are going to be deployed conceivably in 2026, these humanoid robots. I mean,
In 2026, Dave, we're going to start seeing these prototype and test prototype use cases in these various areas I mentioned. So, it's not going to be at scale yet, but it's going to start hitting the radar, and I still will, I think we'll start to change people's minds about how they view companies like Tesla and others. My prediction is a doubling of Tesla's stock over the next 24 to 36 months simply because people are not looking at Tesla the right way right now. China will have a mass production of robots starting actually in the second half of this year moving into 2027-28. You're already seeing Unitree and others start to move to mass production, and that'll happen by end of this year moving to 2027-28. The question will now be geopolitically how we handle the influx of Chinese robots. We're already seeing what BYD is doing on the car front in Europe. BYD is not used here in the US. So, this is going to be an interesting geopolitical question in addition to an investing question, but robo taxis is going to scale this year and you're going to see both Waymo scale to a million paid rides a week, I believe. And you'll see Tesla begin to catch up to Waymo and deploy thousands of cars. Let's remember there's more than 8 million, I think they just hit 9 million Teslas on the road today. So, that's a lot of cars they can start to deploy either directly as Tesla or convince owners to deploy them as robo taxis.
I mean, it's exciting. I think it's exciting what you're talking about, but what you're getting at overall is just the adoption of AI by enterprise, which is one of the biggest questions I think for the market, and whether these high valuations and all the investment is going to ultimately be worth it. But what do you see along, I mean, you work with so many different sectors from financials to pharmaceuticals, which I think there's a lot of promise in AI, but I'm not sure how quickly there's been adoption.
Well, great question. JP Morgan Healthcare Conference is coming up, Jan 12 to 15, coming up in the next two weeks. We'll have to see what announcements come there. But I think that in biotech and pharma, we're seeing a handful of companies like Lilly forge ahead with AI, and you could see the valuation of Lilly pulling ahead of its competitors, but you see a lot of other pharma taking its time with using AI for the real world. So, I would distinguish, Sarah and David, AI for the digital world is large language models, and that's great. AI for the real world is actually using AI to make a drug. Every pharma company is using digital AI right now to make some more productivity in their documents and things like that. The question for 2026-27 is, are we going to start to see more companies like Lilly that are now using AI in a deeper, more fundamental way? And I think when you look at Nvidia, when you look at Google for Gemini, you're starting to see this trend. When you look at applications for Nvidia chips, initially, of course, it was consumer-led in terms of the chip usage in large data centers for consumer, $20 a month ChatGPT, Gemini, xAI, and others. We're starting to see from Nvidia, and I think Nvidia, by the way, is just getting going. So, if people have questions on that, happy to answer those. I think it has a lot of upside because we're just starting to see AI for the real world kicking in with Nvidia chips as well as with Google's TPUs on top of that.
