Humanoid robots showcase skills at Ancient Olympia

With jerky determination, robots played soccer, wowed children with shadowboxing skills and shot arrows on Monday at the birthplace of the Olympic Games.

- By DEREK GATOPOULOS and MATT O'BRIEN

As they shuffled and occasionally froze for a battery change, their creators and futurologists debated the central question of when robots willbe ready to tidy closets and wash dishes.

Outer space before house chores

Despite the explosive advance of artificial intelligence in applications like ChatGPT, their physical cousins — robots with human-like appearances and skills — are lagging years behind.

“T really believe that humanoids will first go to space and then to houses ... the house is the final frontier,” said Minas Liarokapis, a Greek academic and startup founder who organized the International Humanoid Olympiad.

The four-day event gathered experts and developers at Ancient Olympia in southern Greece where the flame is lit every two years for the modern Summer and Winter Games.

“To enter the house it’ll take more than 10 years. Definitely more,” Liarokapis said. “I’m talking about executing tasks with dexterity, not about selling robots that are cute and are companions.”

Training material lacking

AI is racing ahead thanks to vast amounts of data readily available online. But training material for humanoid robots is scarce. It involves real-world actions that are slower, more expensive and harder to record than digital data like text or images.

By one measure, humanlike robots are roughly 100,000 years behind AI in learning from data, according to an article in the current edition of the journal Science Robotics.