p1esk

Current humanoid robotic assistants are in early stage - somewhere around GPT2 level - they're starting to perform very simple, very narrow tasks, but stumble a lot, and still cannot do much. However, I've been tracking the progress in the last couple of years, and I feel that GPT3 level might already be happening, and some startups demonstrate impressive things (e.g. look up Generalist AI or Physical Intelligence). Plus the funding all these startups are getting should allow them to scale their methods 10x-100x of what has been tried so far. I'm not sure any additional research breakthroughs are actually needed to make the leap to usable products.

Therefore, we might soon see a ChatGPT moment in robotics - a commercial availability a physical robot that will be capable of performing useful tasks: cooking, cleaning, simple repairs, yard work, elderly care, etc. Just like ChatGPT-3.5, this won't be reliable, and the robots will still be clunky/dumb, but I think it will be obvious there's a step change/phase transition, where most people realize a paradigm shift is happening. Soon after that initial stage, it will lead to something globally transformative (like GPT4): think of how software engineers currently using Claude Code, but applied to physical world, for everyone, everywhere. Well, everyone who can afford a robot like that - I'm guessing it will cost like a premium car.

I'm curious when this will happen, and what will be the short and medium term consequences of having physical world assistants? My intuition is there's 40% chance we will see it this year, and 70% by the end of next year. I'm pretty sure (90%) we will have somewhat useful robots in people's houses within 3 years. I do realize this might sound very optimistic, but it would had been just as optimistic to predict ChatGPT two years before it was released.