General robots today are magical toddlers: Formic and Matter on the valley of death
AnneliesGamble · x · 2026-10-28
A co-written essay by Formic CEO Saman Farid and Matter Venture Partners GP Haomiao Huang argues today's general-purpose robots are like toddlers doing chores: astonishing generalizability, but useless in business settings — a 30-second task takes 10 minutes.
Key points from the accompanying charts:
- Specialist robots sit in a "revenue corridor" where customers pay at every step; general-but-unreliable models are stuck in a "valley of death" where no one pays
- The axis that matters is deployed surface area over time: the horizontal path grows the install base with every step; the vertical path sits at zero until general AI arrives
- Below a reliability threshold, an 85% robot is worth less than zero — factories buy based on stopped lines, scrap, and babysitters, not linear value
Takeaway: expand horizontally from specialist robots funded by real revenue rather than betting on a single leap to generality.
Related event: Formic Founders Lay Out the Path to Useful General-Purpose Robots(2 posts)→
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