[modeless]

> I can waldo any number of commercially available arms to do work humans do today

Not for everyday tasks with anywhere near the efficiency, reliability, speed, and cost that humans have without robots. You can't waldo any robot to do the laundry or the cooking in a normal home anywhere near as well as a human can do it. (I'd love to see you try!)

Sure, you can make a robot that can do work humans can't. You can make a robot stronger, or more precise, or better suited to repetitive motion than a human. Those attributes are useful in specialized tasks. But generally not for the everyday tasks humans do today that we want robots to help us with. For everyday tasks you need a robot that is comparable in speed, efficiency, weight, reliability, durability, flexibility, sensor capability, and cost to a human. Not one of those areas, but all of them simultaneously. That's the hard part.

[NalNezumi]

This is just moving the goal post of your argument.

But the "Hardware lags behind" only makes sense to Sci-fi like expectations of robot agility but the software isn't even remotely close to embody that hardware. Even In the real world robotics applications TODAY this statement falls flat by one simple demonstration:

Use existing arm + teleoperation and conduct X amount of tasks (could be a mobile robot too, or a car for that matter). Now find a software that have same versatility in task execution as the human.

Most softwares for simple robotics manipulation tasks lose out to human operating it directly, bar efficiency maybe, in an static controlled environment even using the same control and perception system. Yet human controlling these arms directly show that the hardware is capable enough to conduct those tasks.

The "hardware lags behind" statement is if anything just a convenient excuse from the software / automation developers in Robotics, (also being one of them myself) shifting the blame to others, or have a sense of false highground.

The need of Lidar on early self driving cars was the same motivation; somehow softwares couldn't just use camera but needed an additional 6th sense, that humans don't even need, and still performed quite bad.

[joe_the_user]

Even if this is true, that weakens your point that hardware is the fundamental limit for robots. If there are situations where software giving human like behavior to a robot could be extremely valuable, then there's certainly a motivation for generic AI companies to be in that area.

That doesn't mean OpenAI robotics leaving wasn't a good idea. It seems like it was but for other reasons.

[modeless]

Giving robots human-like behavior is mostly useful for general-purpose robots. Specialized robots don't need general AI to do their jobs. OpenAI is trying to develop general human-like AI. There's no general-purpose robot for them to put it in, and developing one is a hardware problem, not a software problem.

[joe_the_user]

Specialized robots don't need general AI to do their jobs.

Self-driving cars have been unable to succeed based on their lack of a broad understanding of what's happening on the road (ie, "too many corner cases"). Self-driving cars would be a huge change and their failure is very significant.

[Dylan16807]

We can build perfectly good robot arms for a huge swath of assembly/warehouse/retail tasks, but there's no AI that can aim them well enough and carefully enough. An overqualified AI would still be a valid solution and extremely valuable.