> Adding arms and 360 vision is not free.

Vision is hard regardless of the angle, but scaling it from a normal camera to 360° doesn't add much cost or difficulty once you've done the hard part of turning pixels into a suitable latent space.

> Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle.

500 million neurons across the whole animal, brain included. We'll only know the synapse count when someone does a full connectome scan of one, but based on the vague estimates I see with a quick search, their whole mind is less complex than a SotA LLM today.

> The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.

This is a reason for specialists, not generalists.

A literal Swiss army knife is a perfectly reasonable thing to own, but you don't want to hire a builder who only has that and nothing else, not even if it's the silly model: https://www.vintageknives.nl/p/wenger-giant-swiss-army-knife...

The best container ship is a terrible pleasure yacht, and vice versa. You use container ships pretty much constantly, even though you (almost certainly) don't own one, by the power of indirection. You can rent a pleasure yacht as desired without owning own.

In both cases, the cheap option is to use the right tool for the right job, rather than to take a holiday on the Hanoi Express and get your next international shipment delivered by this: https://www.boattrader.com/boat/1996-hatteras-82-convertible...