It's true that general-purpose robots have made little progress, compared to general-purpose AI, but the reasons for that might just be financial. AI has become

It's true that general-purpose robots have made little progress, compared to general-purpose AI, but the reasons for that might just be financial. AI has become a self-justifying busines model whereas generalist robots are still academic projects, kind of how deep learning was a decade+ ago. Maybe making tactile-aware robots that can navigate random environments will end up being subsumed by ML algorithms using cheapo hardware, kind of like this: https://mobile-aloha.github.io/ https://mobile-aloha.github.io/ AFAIK this is the current for-profit SOTA robot, which goes for $16,000: https://www.unitree.com/images/Unitree%20G1%20EN%201080p%20%281%29.mp4 https://www.unitree.com/images/Unitree%20G1%20EN%201080p%20%... My guess is that it's just an expensive toy, only useful to robotics researchers. But I can imagine in 10 years the big LLM+vision models could somehow pilot them, perhaps very slowly compared to a human, but as long as they can finish the job at 0.1% of a human's wage, it might not really matter how much slower they are.