Somebody finally said it lol. I think it's easy to see everything with starry eyes if you don't know all that much about robotics or how AI architectures actually work. Companies like Boston dynamics have been trying to solve robotics in the real world for years. Trying to make a humanoid like creature that can move around in an environment is EXTREMELY hard. And that's just on the robotics end, not the AI end.

The best AI right now are text gen and image gen. This is largely because of the amount of training data available for them. Trying to train an agent to interact with environment to preform a skilled trade? That's such an inconceivably hard task. Think about how much time Tesla has tried to make a self driving car, which is honestly really simple compared to a trade. There are maps that tell you the location of every building and road in the world, and there are a set of rules that everyone has to follow. Even then, it still has problems like running lights, failing to see pedestrians in front of it, hell even just looking at the screen you can see it bugging out trying to figure out if it's looking at a truck, car, or a bike.

Now think of that in trade terms. How are we going to have an AI purchase the hardware needed, go to the house, ask the owner what the problem is and where it is, diagnose the problem, and then fix it, all without screwing up and flooding the whole house. These are orders of magnitude more difficult problems for AI to solve that writing an essay, writing code, or creating an image. And we don't even have a lick of training data.

And then for anybody who's like "oh well it was also inconceivable for text and image gen", well I mean maybe for most people, but I think a lot of people (including myself) saw huge potential in them since years ago. I also develop image, video, and language models so it's not like I'm clueless about AI either.