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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

We have just started ramping up practical use of imitation learning from human demonstrations in humanoids. A bigger development is that one or two projects are working on training foundational vision action language models based on large video datasets.

I think before the end of summer general purpose physical knowledge and capabilities will start to be demonstrated by one or more humanoid AI or robotics groups.

Maybe 18 months at the absolute latest.

I'm guessing by next year or 2028 there will be services where you can order a robot to come cook and or clean for you. By 2029 it should be quite affordable to get a humanoid on a short term rental.

Do we have any standard benchmarks for humanoids to do domestic tasks?

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That seems like quite an extrapolation and an extraordinary statement. This is a single task, in a lab setting. What your describing are extremely open-ended tasks in people’s homes.

What is informing these timelines?

Look at recent developments/announcements involving novel increasingly generalizable learning capabilities from projects like 1X/Neo, Figure 03, Skild AI. Also see open published work like MimicDroid, HDMI, GenMimic, Humanoid-Union Dataset, RoboMirror, Being-H0

Figure 03:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-31-KBBuXM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTzuhkDG3w

1X Neo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS_z60kjVEk

Skild AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRmjBdKKLsc (Learning by Watching Human Videos)

Yeah those are demos. I think we‘re pretty far away from this becoming a real thing. I wrote up why here: https://matthiasplappert.com/blog/2026/humanoid-robot-in-the...

You're not really trying to see the advances in things like the data flywheel. If you were you would see that those demos represent real movement towards generality.

Where’s the data flywheel exactly?

Hey guys I rooted my humanoid and it killed my mom when I disabled the "slow limb motion" mode. It just wacked her in the head as she walked in the kitchen and she's not moving what do I do??

You should @linustechtips and hope he picks it up, then you have a good chance of getting a voucher for the funeral and getting a shout out in the manufacturers next demo when they talk about their new safety features.

" Do we have any standard benchmarks for humanoids to do domestic tasks?" The answer is yes. Steve Wozniak proposed the Coffee Test. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MowergwQR5Y

It's actually very clever. Despite the apparent simplicity, no current model could pass it.

Re your forecasts, I think they are optimistic in terms of timing but not ridiculously so.

I think coffee test for robots will be similar to Turing Test for LLMs, which was quietly achieved and forgotten somewhere between gpt-3.5 and gpt-4. Real tests are tasks like cooking or plumbing - I expect that to come in 2-3 years.

The "AGI" (-ish) moment for AI was shoving Common Crawl into a transformer.

What's the animal intelligence (physical int.) equivalent of that? I don't think such a dataset exists? (e.g. NVidia is trying to compensate for that with simulated worlds, i.e. synthetic data)

I know labs are throwing an insane amount of money wherever they can to try and build datasets for this - at claru.ai we're working with a few and they are even grabbing all the players like labelbox, toloka etc to throw armies at getting bespoke data for these needs. Most of the time its get data then figure out what to do with it after...the unfortunate strategy from what I'm seeing but data is a moat in their eyes

I think that's a bit too optimistic, but I still think the direction is right-ish. It feels hard to give a timeline though. Robotics is hard.

>I'm guessing by next year or 2028 there will be services where you can order a robot to come cook and or clean for you.

Bullshit.

omg Elon Musk posts here! Are we also going to get full self driving, no interventions from NYC to LA within this timeframe, sir???

I’ve been thinking about this too, and I share your optimism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213310

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