Do you want to make a robotic snowman?

Nvidia’s GTC conference had everything: billions of dollars in sales, image technology that he can yassify video gamesbig announcements that Every company needs an OpenClaw solutionand a robot version of the beloved snowman Olaf from Disney’s “Frozen.”

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcastTechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I recap CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech and discuss what it means for Nvidia’s future. And yes, a large part of our conversation focused on poor Olaf, whose microphone was turned off when he started wandering around.

Even if the show were to go well, Sean might still have reservations, as he noted that the presentation always focused on “engineering challenges” rather than “realistically messy areas” of behavior.

“But what happens when a child pushes Olaf?” Sean asked. “So any other kid who sees Olaf get pushed or knocked down, their whole trip to Disney is ruined and it ruins the brand?”

Read a preview of our interview, edited for length and clarity, below.

Anthony: (CEO Jensen Huang) was saying that every company should have an OpenClaw solution now. I think that is a very successful word that is meant to be attractive; I think it’s also interesting to come at a time when OpenClaw is changing.

The developer has gone to OpenAI. So now it’s this open source project that can improve and evolve beyond its creator, or it can become weak. If companies like Nvidia are investing heavily in it, then (it’s) an opportunity for them to continue to evolve. But it’s going to be interesting to see a year from now, whether it’s going to be a buzzword or everybody’s like, “Open what?”

Kirsten: In Nvidia’s case, it doesn’t cost them anything in the grand scheme of things to implement what they call NemoClaw, which is an open source project, built by the developer of OpenClaw. But if they don’t act, they have a lot to lose. So the same message to me, as I interpreted it when Jensen was like, “Every business has to have an OpenClaw approach,” was, “Nvidia has to have a solution or a business strategy, because if it’s successful, it’s one way or another way for Nvidia to be part of a lot of other companies.” So doing nothing is more dangerous than doing things that go nowhere.

Sean: The real question here is why we didn’t talk about what is the best end game for Nvidia, and something that will turn into the first company worth $100 trillion, which is Olaf’s robot.

Anthony: How can I forget?

Kirsten: Anthony, just go to the end of two and a half hours to see this.

So, Olaf the robot comes out, and this is what Jensen likes to do. They tend to have these demos and some go better than others. I’m also showing Nvidia’s technology in robotics, and I don’t know if Olaf was talking in real time or if it was programmed – it seemed a little programmed, or it had keywords that he used.

But the biggest part of it is that he cut off his microphone at the end because it just started vibrating and talking to people. Then it went to its small passage and was lowered slowly. And you can see it on video. It was still talking, but there was no mic.

Sean: Now we just need to give this little robot a wheel. And I know the perfect initiator who can provide it.

I mean, these demos are always stupid. I don’t want to stand on my soapbox, because I know we’ve talked about it a little bit this week, but this was an interesting show until it fell a little short.

This is another good example, however, of (how) robotics is a very interesting engineering problem and an interesting physics problem and an interesting combination problem, and all these things, but this was presented as, in collaboration with Disney, and it should be the future of Disney parks and things like this: You will be able to walk around and see Olaf and draw all the “cool”.

But these efforts are not considered – or not prioritized by events like this – all the other things you have to think about when you release something like this. There’s a great YouTuber, Defunctland, who did it great video for this – four hours, not too long – about Disney’s history of trying to get these kinds of robots in their park, these automatons.

The engineering challenges are very interesting and it’s fun to see the history, but it comes back to the same question: OK, but what happens when the kid pushes Olaf? And then every other kid who sees Olaf get pushed or knocked down, their entire trip to Disney is ruined and it ruins the brand?

There are many cultural aspects of this. And that sounds silly, but this is a question that we’re kind of asking about humanoid robots, too. There’s a lot of commotion about all these other things and we don’t just hear a lot of talk about the social disruption of these things, but also how they integrate into people’s lives. We only hear about the engineering challenges – which are impressive.

Kirsten: I have an objection and then we should go to the next (heading). This is for work, because Olaf will have to have a babysitter at Disneyland, maybe dressed as Elsa or something. You can imagine that basically, what we are doing is creating a service (and) this technical experiment.