Do you want to build a robot snowman?

Nvidia’s GTC conference had it all: trillion-dollar sales forecasts, graphics technology that can do it yassify video gamesgrand declarations that every company needs an OpenClaw strategy, and even a robot version of the beloved snowman Olaf from Disney’s “Frozen.”

In the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I recapped CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote and discussed what it means for Nvidia’s future. And yes, a lot of our discussion was about poor Olaf, whose microphone had to be turned off when he started talking.

Even if the demo had gone off without a hitch, Sean might still have had some reservations, as he noted that these presentations always focus on “the technical challenges” and not the “really messy gray areas” on the social side.

“But what happens when a kid kicks Olaf over?” Sean asked. “And then for every other kid, seeing Olaf get kicked or knocked over ruins the whole trip to Disney, and that ruins the brand?”

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

Anthony: [CEO Jensen Huang] basically said that every company should have an OpenClaw strategy now. I think this is just a really grand statement designed to grab attention; I think it’s also interesting to come to these kinds of transition points for OpenClaw.

The founder went to OpenAI. So now it is this open source project that can potentially flourish and evolve beyond its creator, or it can wither away. If companies like Nvidia invest a lot in it, then yes [it’s] more likely that it will continue to develop. But it’ll be interesting to see a year from now if that seems like a prescient statement or if everyone says, “Open what?”

Kirsten: In Nvidia’s case, it costs them nothing in the grand scheme of things to launch what they call NemoClaw, an open source project they built together with the OpenClaw maker. But if they do nothing, they have a lot to lose. So that message for me, as I translated it when Jensen said, “Every enterprise needs an OpenClaw strategy,” was, “Nvidia needs to have an enterprise solution or strategy because if it’s successful, it’s another way or path for Nvidia to join countless other companies.” So doing nothing is a greater risk than doing something that leads nowhere.

Sean: The real question here is why we haven’t talked about what is clearly the end game for Nvidia, and what will make it the first $100 trillion company, which is an Olaf robot.

Anthony: How could I forget?

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

So the Olaf robot comes out, and this is something that Jensen likes to do. He loves having these demos and some go better than others. It’s also meant to demonstrate Nvidia’s technology in robotics, and I don’t know if Olaf was actually speaking in real time or if it was programmed – it felt a bit programmed, or it used specific keywords.

But the best part is that at the end they had to cut the microphone off because it just started talking and talking to the audience. And then it went to its little passage and was slowly lowered. And you could see that on the video. People were still talking, but there was no microphone.

Sean: Now we just need to give this little robot a wheelbase. And I know the perfect founder who can provide that.

I mean, these demos are always stupid. I don’t want to get on my soapbox because I know we talked about this earlier this week, but this was an impressive demo up until the point where it fell a little short.

However, this is another very good example of this [how] Robotics is a very interesting engineering problem and a very interesting physics problem and a very interesting integration problem, and all these things, but this was presented as, in collaboration with Disney, and it’s supposed to be the future of Disney parks and things like that: you’ll be able to walk around and see Olaf from “Frozen” and take pictures of it and stuff.

But these efforts never take into account – or certainly don’t put at the center of events like this – all the other things you need to consider when you roll out things like this. There’s a really good YouTuber, Defunctland, who did just that a very good video about this – four hours, not too long – about the history of Disney trying to get these kinds of robotics into their park, these vending machines.

The technical challenges are very interesting and it’s fun to see that history, but it always comes back to the same question: okay, but what happens when a kid kicks Olaf over? And then for every other kid, seeing Olaf get kicked or knocked over ruins the whole trip to Disney, and ruins the brand?

There’s so much to the social side of this. And that sounds strange, but this is the question we also ask ourselves about humanoid robots. There’s so much hype about all these other things and we just don’t hear as many conversations about the really messy gray areas on the social side of these things, and also integrating them into people’s lives. We really only hear about the technical challenges – which are again very impressive.

Kirsten: I have a counterpoint and then we have to move on to the next one [topic]. This creates employment, as Olaf will have to have a human babysitter at Disneyland, probably dressed as Elsa or something else. You can imagine that what we actually do is create jobs [with] this technical experiment.