Will Robotics Have a ChatGPT Moment?

['Over the next few decades, billions of autonomous, AI-powered robots will work alongside people in factories, perform tedious tasks in warehouses, care for the elderly, assist in unsafe disaster areas, deliver packages and food to our doorsteps, and eventually, help out in our homes. Some will look like us, and many won’t. What is certain is that regardless of form factor, robots will all rely heavily on AI in order to deliver real-world value.', 'In 2025, total investments in robotics companies reached a record $40.7 billion, accounting for 9 percent of all venture funding.

The multibillion-dollar question therefore is this: What will it take for AI-powered robots to begin to have a serious economic impact? Many of today’s robotics and AI companies are making bold claims, such as that humanoid robots will soon be coming into our homes, but there’s still a big gap between promise and reality.', 'The promise of robots that live and work alongside us has been the stuff of science fiction for a very long time. And while many programmers have tried to make that promise a reality, the physical world is just too complicated for traditional computer programs to handle the endless complexity it presents.

Thanks to AI, robots are no longer being programmed—instead, they learn to operate in the real world. With enough practice, they can learn to perceive and understand the world around them, reason about that world, and use that reason and understanding to perform tasks that are useful, reliable, and safe.', 'The two of us have worked at the forefront of AI and robotics for the last decade, as a Professor in Robotics at Oregon State University and Co-Founder of Agility Robotics, and as former CEO of the Everyday Robots moonshot at Google X. Our experience deploying AI-powered robots in real-world settings has given us a perspective on where AI can be used to great benefit in complex robotic systems in the near term, and where we are still on the frontier of science fiction.

We believe AI will enable an inflection point in robotics advances, but that it will be through the well-engineered application of coordinated systems of different AI tools rather than a single ChatGPT-style breakthrough.', 'Here are five hard truths that will define AI in robotics. 1. The YouTube-to-Reality Gap Is Real: For years we have been seeing videos on YouTube with humanoid robots performing amazing moves on everything from a dance floor to an obstacle course.

The inside knowledge in robotics is to “never trust a YouTube robot video.” The gap between real robots that can perform real work in unstructured human environments and carefully scripted and edited robot performances remains significant. 2. Data Is An Unsolved Challenge: Large Language Models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude were initially trained on an internet-scale database of text.