What Will the First Robot Tasks Look Like?

Josh Gao says the first robot tasks will be much more constrained and goal-oriented, jobs a team can hill-climb because a standard operating procedure already defines the work. Laundry folding is one example. The effort to solve laundry folding ran for a year and a half or more.

The home needs the most care by far. Benchmarks and evaluations have only started to mature, including a check that a robot does not fall on a baby. Broader robotics still arrives as a slow creep of commercial use cases. A base of data that shows generalization and scaling laws gives people the courage to scale, and in-domain, in-task data in post-training closes the remaining gap. Collecting in one exact room, including a podcast demonstration, is aimed at a level that in a lot of cases means four nines of reliability.