Evidence from 2025 shows a clear surge in humanoid-robot R&D, investment, and pilot deployments, but not the level of mainstream commercial use and broad public recognition as a major platform that the prediction requires.

Surge and visibility (prediction gets this part roughly right):

• Multiple outlets explicitly described 2025 as a pivotal year for humanoid robots. Wired called it the year that multipurpose humanoid robots "go commercial," highlighting Boston Dynamics’ Atlas entering a Hyundai factory and Agility’s Digit and Figure’s robots beginning paid work in warehouses and other sites. (wired.com)
• Business Insider’s late‑2025 overview of six leading humanoid-robot companies notes that Agility’s Digit is already deployed commercially at GXO Logistics and Amazon, and frames humanoids as rapidly moving from science fiction toward practical reality. (businessinsider.com)
• Governments and industry coalitions treated humanoids as strategic: China’s government work report and trade-fair materials describe 2025 as the first year of mass production for humanoid robots and integrate "embodied intelligence" into national industrial policy; South Korea launched the K‑Humanoid Alliance to build a national humanoid ecosystem. (globalomp.com)
• China hosted the first World Humanoid Robot Games in August 2025 with 500+ robots competing, and conferences like the Humanoids Summit expanded globally, underscoring growing public and investor visibility. (en.wikipedia.org)

But deployment is not yet mainstream commercial use (prediction fails here):

• The scale of real-world deployments remains small and experimental. GXO’s own disclosures describe its Digit deployment at a Spanx warehouse as the first commercial application of a humanoid robot and emphasize that only a small fleet is in use; Business Insider notes GXO has just two Digit units active and that widespread deployment "is not imminent." (therobotreport.com)
• A 2025 industry white paper on humanoid applications characterizes 2025 as a “critical starting phase” for industrial deployment, but explicitly projects 2027 as the year of small‑batch production and 2030 as the starting point for real commercialization, implying that 2025 is still pre‑mainstream. (sohu.com)
• Chosun Ilbo’s 2025 analysis likewise calls this the inaugural year of mass production but quotes Unitree’s CEO predicting a "ChatGPT moment" for humanoids 2–3 years in the future, and cites Goldman Sachs’ forecast of a relatively small $1.5B market in 2025 versus $37.8B by 2035—again suggesting that broad, mainstream commercial penetration has not yet arrived. (chosun.com)
• Even where commercial pilots exist (e.g., Digit at Amazon and GXO, Apptronik’s Apollo at Mercedes factories, Kepler’s K2 robots entering mass production), the coverage consistently describes them as early trials or milestones rather than ubiquitous, routine tools across warehouses, factories, or consumer settings. (reuters.com)

Public recognition as a “major technology platform” is still emerging, not achieved:

• Media, investors, and policymakers are heavily focused on humanoids, and 2025 saw new summits, national alliances, and even international robot games, which indicates rising awareness. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Yet the same industry reports and news pieces frame humanoids as on the verge of breakthrough rather than already widely adopted—explicitly forecasting a ChatGPT‑like popularization in several years and placing true large‑scale commercialization closer to the late 2020s. (chosun.com) There is no evidence that the general public in 2025 sees humanoid robots as a mature, mainstream platform on par with smartphones or even consumer AI assistants.

Because by late 2025 humanoid robots are high-visibility but still in early, small‑scale commercial pilots, and industry consensus pushes genuine mainstream deployment and broad public recognition into the later 2020s, Friedberg’s stronger claim—that by year‑end 2025 humanoid robots would be in mainstream commercial use cases and widely recognized by the public as a major new technology platform—has not come true.