Are humanoid robots actually doing real jobs yet — or is it all hype?

Some humanoids are doing paid factory work, but home robots remain promises; judge progress by deployed shifts, uptime, and repeat orders rather than demos.

The honest answer is “some factory work, not household help”: Figure AI has robots performing paid commercial tasks at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, with recent reporting putting deployment around 740 units, while Tesla’s Optimus remains internal and has no public sale date. Barron’s reported Oct. 8 that Elon Musk is keeping Optimus Gen 3 under wraps because competitors analyze Tesla’s videos frame by frame, even as suppliers prepare for roughly 15,000 units by year-end.

Tesla also cut planned AI5 memory from 144GB to 96GB and AI6 to 144GB LPDDR6 because lower-cost chips can be produced at robot-scale volume; for vision workloads, moving data quickly often matters more than maximizing raw capacity. Judge the field by paid deployments, autonomous hours, intervention rate, uptime, and repeat orders—not a choreographed demo or an announced production target.