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Why Today's Humanoids Won't Learn Dexterity

In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training. At the end of the post, after I have completed my argument on this point, I have included two more short pieces.

I have had VCs to whom we have pitched (as is the parlance in startup land) for funding to scale to meet our customer pull, question why we would possibly do that as everyone knows that two legged, and two armed, humanoid robots will take over most human jobs in two years. Christian Hubicki, director of the robotics lab at FAMU-FSU, noted to Business Insider that the multiangle camera setup likely captures “minute details, like the location of joints and fingers,” making the data more precise. On March 13 th, 2019 (pre LLM), Rich Sutton (who was later the 2024 co-winner of the Turing Prize with Andrew Barto for their work on Reinforcement Learning) published a mildly triumphant short blog post titled A Bitter Lesson.

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