It used to be that you needed years and lots of specialist skills to build humanoid robots. Not anymore. Now base models are open-source. Want more complex appendages? Companies like Shadow Robot are making and selling those. Open-source AI is almost as good as closed-source industry leaders. Unitree’s new advanced humanoid robot starts at only $16,000. You can bet Chinese manufacturing will keep lowering that cost.
So it’s reasonable to think complex, advanced, and powerful humanoid robots may cost < $5,000 by 2030 or so. Sci-fi has imagined lots of robot futures, but I don’t recall it often anticipating that aspect. Robots will be cheap to buy and own. Economists, and by extension our governments, have anticipated this even less.
I’m not convinced that ChatGPT is the right way to AGI but watching the demos of GPT4 omni and seeing these cheap robots does make it feel like the next 5 years are going to be … interesting times shall we say.