I saw robots doing this in tech demos 15 years ago. And even those robots weren't doing anything new. Like all AI models, this is just AI repackaging and rebranding of things that robots have already been programmed to do using more classical control methods. The idea to do everything via AI was of course thought of for a long time, but the conclusion has been we have faster and more reliable methods to do the same thing with less compute, and that's still true.

During my undergrad I worked on a project where we set off a bunch of walking robots, recorded their walks, and then used the data as the basis for a learned walking controller. I see this Xiaomi model as pretty much like that.

It's a nice technology and maybe could lead to better folding one day but unfortunately it's not "finally we have robots that can do our laundry" (yet).

Yeah exactly. I've been seeing demos like this for ages. I'm kinda shocked at the lack of skepticism in the comments here. The hackernews comment sections have changed a lot these past couple years...