I think it's an issue of hierarchies and the Society of Mind (Minsky). If a human touches a hot stove, or any animal's end effector, a lower-level process instantly pulls the hand/paw away from the heat. There are no doubt thousands of these 'smart body, no brain' interactions that take over in certain situations, conscious thinking not required.
Ken Goldberg shows that getting robots to operate in the real world using methods that have been successful getting LLMs to do things we consider smart -- getting huge amounts of training data -- seems unlikely. The vastness between what little data a company like Physical Intelligence has vs what GPT-5 uses is shown here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16DzKxYvRutTN7GBflRZj57WgsFN... 84 seconds
Ken advocates plenty of Good Old-Fashioned Engineering to help close this gap, and worries that demos like Optimus actually set the field back because expectations are set too high. Like the AI researchers who were shocked by LLMs' advances, it's possible something out of left field will close this training gap for robots. I think it'll be at least 5 more years before robots will be among us as useful in-house servants. We'll see if the LLM hype has spilled over too much into the humanoid robot domain soon enough.
Ken Goldberg shows that getting robots to operate in the real world using methods that have been successful getting LLMs to do things we consider smart -- getting huge amounts of training data -- seems unlikely. The vastness between what little data a company like Physical Intelligence has vs what GPT-5 uses is shown here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16DzKxYvRutTN7GBflRZj57WgsFN... 84 seconds
Ken advocates plenty of Good Old-Fashioned Engineering to help close this gap, and worries that demos like Optimus actually set the field back because expectations are set too high. Like the AI researchers who were shocked by LLMs' advances, it's possible something out of left field will close this training gap for robots. I think it'll be at least 5 more years before robots will be among us as useful in-house servants. We'll see if the LLM hype has spilled over too much into the humanoid robot domain soon enough.