This is an incredibly bold claim, and mostly just sounds like your personal opinion towards humanoid robots. Why do you expect economies of scale to not apply here?
> No one will want one in their homes.
I am literally prepared to pay a car's worth of money for a robot, humanoid or otherwise, that can meaningfully take care of the drudgery of household chores.
I think that's the key. I like my Roomba, and I didn't have to take out a loan to get it. Humanoid robots will always be more expensive than a Roomba. Short of heavy subsidies, no amount of scale will change that.
It seems like a human-like form the best way forward for robots that will assist in the home -- pretty much everything in the home (including humans themselves) is designed around the human form factor.
People said similar things about those early NNs generating images, code, music.
Surely we will solve the fine motor skills soon. It just takes one incremental step at a time, there are no fundamental roadblocks on the way.
> No one will want one in their homes.
I would kill for a robot that keeps my house clean, makes my favorite food, fetches me things, etc.
While I could pay a human to do that, it just seems more convenient if that wasn't a real person. Because with a real person I can't e.g. walk naked around them and behave generally weird, because I need to respect their feelings, which I don't have to do with a robot.
> People said similar things about those early NNs generating images, code, music.
Yes and… they still are expensive, bulky, and creepy. The expense and bulk is externalised to the stock market (but maybe improving), the creepy is endemic and not getting any better.
An expensive/bulky GPU doesn't have to be built in the robot body itself — it could be a box mounted somewhere in the house with the wireless connection to the robot body.
I am sure at some point there will be hardware that would protect model vendors from extracting/copying the model weights, like on-chip encryption when doing inference or something.
Or maybe there will be GPUs with homomorphic encryption¹, so everything will be end-to-end encrypted, and it will be safe to compute in the cloud without compromising user privacy.
I do think smarter robots will take off, but I don't think this form factor will be as important as it seems right now. Maybe just for novelty or entertainment.
Maybe in factories? However, the main reason to have a humanoid robot is to have it fit in places designed for humans. Factories can be designed around robots, so the human-shaped advantage isn't there. The robots we currently see in factories are only arms with tools, I don't see that changing much.