Robotics just got a software industry
Humanoid robotics has been organised around vertical integration because the control stack and the hardware co-evolve. A foundation model from one company running on another company's robot breaks that assumption — and that break is the precondition for anything resembling a software market.
Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models are going onto Boston Dynamics' electric Atlas. Two of the strongest organisations in their respective layers, deliberately not doing each other's job.
Why on-device is the load-bearing detail
A model requiring a datacentre round trip is not a robot controller; it is teleoperation with extra steps and a network dependency in the control loop. Local execution is what makes sourcing the brain independently of the body practical rather than notional, and it is the reason this partnership is a product decision rather than a demo.
Three market shapes, and which one is winning
Integrated builders — Figure, Tesla, 1X — keep models closed and hardware-tuned, betting co-design beats modularity. Pure model companies like Physical Intelligence and Skild sell no robot at all. And in between sits the open-building-block position.
GR00T is at 1.7 in early access after three release cycles in fifteen months, with Cosmos Reason integration — a familiar NVIDIA play: supply the layer everyone builds on, stay neutral about who wins above it, sell the hardware underneath either way. Coupling reasoning to control is the substantive part, because robotics pilots die on situational judgment far more than on actuation.
What the long tail does next
The decisive population is not Figure or Tesla; it is the hardware makers who cannot fund foundation-model research and until now had no path to a competitive control stack. If they standardise on GR00T or on Gemini Robotics, the integrated builders are competing against an entire industry's software rather than against individual rivals.
Every hardware category that developed a software industry ended up commoditising the hardware. Robotics has just started that clock.
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