With a million robots you can perform a billion iterations. We won't need a billion iterations on every task; we will start to see generalization and task transfer just as we did for LLMs once we have LLM-scale data.

You are right that failure is costly with today's robots. We need to reduce the cost of failure. That means cheaper and more robust robots. Robots that, like a toddler, can jump off a couch and fall over and still be OK.

Tying back to the article, this is the real evolutionary advantage that humans have over AIs. Not innate language skills or anything about the brain. It's our highly optimized, perceptive, robust, reliable, self-repairing, fail-safe, and efficient bodies, allowing us to experiment and learn in the real physical world.