The NYT article talks about how a technician in a call center is operating it now, and whilst operating, their systems are gathering information to guide the robot in future un-manned tasks. Much like an LLM analyzes thousands of essays in order to "write" it's own, so to will these robots analyze thousands of hours of technician-guided activities in order to do it autonomously in the future.
Very interesting, and very much the same as how they "taught" self-driving cars to operate. One can imagine that if efforts continue in these fields, it's only a matter of time before we actually do have fully automated robot butlers, that only need the occasional reboot, or technician support. This would be a massive boon to literally every service industry, from transporting patients in the hospital, working in a warehouse, assembly techs, to waiters and waitresses. Shit, how soon until they deploy them on the battlefield?
Considering they have robot cafes operating in Japan already, we could see this happen sooner than we think, if the companies choose to share all their training data, that is.
The only question that remains, is would this lead to a new era of prosperity and free time, or would this just be another tool to further enrich the entrenched capital?
