What's interesting to me along these lines is I assume most of the companies funding the research are targeting the "creative" media in terms of image generation, music generation, avatars, speach, etc.

I can understand it's very interesting from a researcher's point-of-view (I'm a software dev who's worked adjacent to some ML researchers doing pipeline stuff to integrate models into software), but at the same time: Where are the robots to do menial work like clean toilets, kitchens, homes, etc?

I assume the funding isn't there? Or maybe it's much less exciting to research diffusion networks for image generation that working out algorithms for the best way to clean toilets :)