[marcus_holmes]

Well, kinda, but if you built a robot to efficiently mow lawns, it's still not going to be able to do the laundry.

I don't see how "when they can do something, they'll be able to do everything" can be true. We build robots that are specialised at specific roles, because it's massively more efficient to do that. A car-welding robot can weld cars together at a rate that a human can't match.

We could train an LLM to drive a Boston Dynamics kind of anthropomorphic robot to weld cars, but it will be more expensive and less efficient than the specialised car-welding robot, so why would we do that?

[EGreg]

If a humanoid robot is able to move its limbs and digits with the same dexterity as a human, and maintain balance and navigate obstacles, and gently carry things, everything else is trivial.

Welding. Putting up shelves. Playing the piano. Cooking. Teaching kids. Disciplining them. By being in 1 million households and being trained on more situations than a human, every single one of these robots would have skills exceeding humans very quickly. Including parenting skills. Within a year or so. Many parents will just leave their kids with them and a generation will grow up preferring bots to adults. The LLM technology is the same for learning the steps, it's just the motor skills that are missing.

OK, these robots won't be able to run and play soccer or do somersaults, yet. But really, the hardest part is the acrobatics and locomotion etc. NOT the knowhow of how to complete tasks using that.

[marcus_holmes]

But that's the point - we don't build robots that can do a wide range of tasks with ease. We build robots that can do single tasks super-efficiently.

I don't see that changing. Even the industrial arm robots that are adaptable to a range of tasks have to be configured to the task they are to do, because it's more efficient that way.

A car-welding robot is never going to be able to mow the lawn. It just doesn't make financial sense to do that. You could, possibly, have a singe robot chassis that can then be adapted to weld cars, mow the lawn, or do the laundry, I guess that makes sense. But not as a single configuration that could do all of those things. Why would you?

[Jensson]

> But that's the point - we don't build robots that can do a wide range of tasks with ease. We build robots that can do single tasks super-efficiently.

Because we don't have AGI yet. When AGI is here those robots will be priority number one, people already are building humanoid robots but without intelligence to move it there isn't much advantage.

[marcus_holmes]

quoting the ggggp of this comment:

> I think this whole “AGI” thing is so badly defined that we may as well say we already have it. It already passes the Turing test and does well on tons of subjects.

The premise of the argument we're disputing is that waiting for AGI isn't necessary and we could run humanoid robots with LLMs to do... stuff.

[EGreg]

I meant deep neural networks with transformer architecture, and self-attention so they can be trained using GPUs. Doesn't have to be specifically "large language" models necessarily, if that's your hangup.