Humanoid home-task failures gave r/singularity a half-full glass

The number that split the room

A r/singularity thread on humanoid robots failing 88% of home tasks drew 95 points and 73 comments because the same statistic supported two opposite moods. The linked Forbes article frames household humanoids as entering the home era while still failing most common tasks. Reddit users immediately flipped the number around: if robots already complete about 12% of benchmarked home tasks, is that bad, or is it the first visible foothold in a hard robotics problem?

That ambiguity is why the thread worked. Humanoid robotics has a hype problem, but home robotics also has a difficulty problem that outsiders often underestimate. A kitchen, laundry room, or living room is full of deformable objects, partial visibility, clutter, liquids, glass, fabric, pets, and humans. A 12% success rate can look terrible next to product videos. It can also look like progress compared with the near-zero baseline of general-purpose home robots just a few years ago.

Reddit checked the benchmark context

The most useful comments did not simply cheer or dismiss the number. One user pointed out that the underlying report appears to rely on BEHAVIOR-1K-era data and may not include newer systems such as Figure 03, 1X Neo, or Boston Dynamics' latest public work. That matters because robotics progress is uneven and fast-moving. A benchmark snapshot can be accurate and still feel stale if the hardware and policies being compared have already changed.

Other commenters took the opposite angle: the worst they will ever be is now. That optimism is common in r/singularity, but it is not entirely empty. Home-task robots improve through better vision-language-action models, more teleoperation data, stronger simulation, cheaper actuators, and more robust manipulation policies. The question is not whether the fail rate drops. It is how quickly it drops outside carefully selected demos.

Why this is a better conversation than hype

The thread's value is that it treated failure as data. A high fail rate keeps expectations grounded, especially for products marketed as domestic helpers. But the community also noticed that home tasks are exactly the kind of messy, long-tail environment where progress will arrive unevenly. Folding laundry, clearing dishes, opening cabinets, and safely moving near people are not one benchmark problem. They are hundreds of edge cases stacked together.

For readers tracking humanoid robots, the useful takeaway is neither panic nor dismissal. The 88% fail rate says household autonomy remains immature. The 12% success rate says the baseline is no longer zero. r/singularity's argument sits between those numbers: the field is still bad at homes, but it is now bad in a measurable, improvable way.

Forbes article · Reddit discussion