| Good floor cleaning robots are effective. Your anecdote doesn't prove otherwise. It's like a 4-5+ billion dollar market. If you look at demos from this article, ALOHA, Tesla's bot, Asimo, etc. you will see more and more skills being demonstrated. The biggest thing missing from most systems is probably strong fluent motion with integrated sensing and actual hands. But the Tesla robot for example has made a lot of progress on those fronts and does have hands with touch sensors. What are the skills that your average human has? And let's see if we have robots that can do that. Maybe not quite as well YET, but still the same skill. - can walk around. Check - play soccer. Check - locate and pick up objects from a flat surface. Check. - assemble objects together. Check. - put dishes in a dishwasher.check - play the piano.check - climb stairs. Check. - do a front flip. Check. - open doors. Check. - drive a car. Check. - write a computer program. Check. - draw or paint. Check. - put clothes in dryer. Check. - understand and produce natural language. Check. We are really at the point of just making these things work better and be deployed. And there is rapid progress. The large multimodal models provide a new level of generality that is accelerating this. I believe that within say 2-5 years you will see an explosion of robots with more skills than any human could ever hope to achieve in their lifetime. Just like you can download LoRAs that make LLMs more capable in a certain programming language or art style, there will eventually be adapters to instantly provide any type of skill desired. You will just say "I would like a martial arts lesson" and your android helper just looks off into the distance for a few seconds and then says "I.. I know Kung Fu!" Then launches into a demonstration worthy of The Matrix. |