Boston Dynamics Is Gearing Up to Produce Thousands of Robot Dogs

The interesting meta-point here is the chicken-egg problem between cheap robotic hardware and large-scale data collection.

We don't have general-purpose robotics because there aren't enough robots being built for them to become cheap.

And the robots can't do anything in the real world because they cost too much for someone to gather 1m hours of training data.

Presumably this is the Softbank game plan -- build a ton of general-purpose robotic hardware platforms, and hope that they (or another group) figures out how to build general-purpose algorithms in the next few years.

It's a calculated risk that Softbank have the resources to bankroll.