I was hoping "Lite" would be a smaller humanoid that I could build for <$5K, but this looks expensive.

I think “Lite” just means it’s a spin-off of the original Berkeley Humanoid — same core team, mostly. Honestly, they’re being pretty modest. “Berkeley Open Humanoid” would also be a good name since it highlights the open-source angle.

As for the $5K comment — depends where you’re coming from. My kid does VEX V5 and that budget barely covers a full field + comp-ready robots and enough spare parts to actually learn with. And those robots are tiny — one leg of this humanoid is probably bigger than the whole thing.