Benchmarks Lie, Rooms Don’t: Why Embodied AI Fails the Moment It Enters Your House
Opening — Why this matters now Embodied AI is having its deployment moment. Robots are promised for homes, agents for physical spaces, and multimodal models are marketed as finally “understanding” the real world. Yet most of these claims rest on benchmarks designed far away from kitchens, hallways, mirrors, and cluttered tables. This paper makes an uncomfortable point: if you evaluate agents inside the environments they will actually operate in, much of that apparent intelligence collapses. ...