Claims

Factual · AI capabilities

“It still can't fold clothes, right?”

Nate Silver, interviewee · 13 August 2024 · Nate Silver's On the Edge audio interview (Audible)

In August 2024, Silver suggested, as a rhetorical question, that AI still could not fold clothes or do laundry.

Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.

What would count as true or false

Judged as of 2024-08-13. The claim is that AI systems (AI-driven robots) still could not fold clothes. True: evidence from mid-2024 shows that no AI or robotic system could fold ordinary clothes in a general, practical way. Isolated research demos of narrow folding, on specific items in controlled settings, do not change this, because the remark is about general capability. Mostly true: general capability was still absent, but credible research demos of AI-driven robots folding clothes (e.g. towels or shirts) did exist by August 2024, which the remark glosses over. Mixed: experts or the evidence from that time are split on whether AI robots could fold clothes in a meaningful sense. Mostly false: by August 2024, AI-driven robots had publicly shown reliable folding of varied real garments, beyond narrow staged demos, even though they were not commercially deployed. False: by August 2024, AI-powered systems were deployed or sold that reliably fold everyday clothes.

Evidence

1. Learning Arbitrary-Goal Fabric Folding with One Hour of Real Robot Experience PMLR (Proceedings of Machine Learning Research), Conference on Robot Learning · 4 October 2021

   “We demonstrate our method on a set of towel-folding tasks, and show that our approach is able to discover sequential folding strategies, purely from trial-and-error.”

2. Learning Keypoints from Synthetic Data for Robotic Cloth Folding arXiv

   “We evaluate the performance of this detector for folding towels on a unimanual robot setup and find that the grasp and fold success rates are 77% and 53%, respectively.”

3. Learning Keypoints from Synthetic Data for Robotic Cloth Folding arXiv

   “The fold success rate is lower than the grasp success rate due to the limitations of scripted trajectories and single-arm manipulation:”

4. Learning Keypoints from Synthetic Data for Robotic Cloth Folding arXiv

   “However, more extensive tuning is required to completely overcome the reality gap.”

5. Learning Keypoints from Synthetic Data for Robotic Cloth Folding arXiv (academic preprint by university robotics researchers)

   “We evaluate the performance of this detector for folding towels on a unimanual robot setup and find that the grasp and fold success rates are 77% and 53%, respectively.”

6. Learning Keypoints from Synthetic Data for Robotic Cloth Folding arXiv (academic preprint by university robotics researchers)

   “Although these systems perform very well in their test settings, the segmentation algorithms assume a known background color distribution, which strongly limits the potential to generalise to diverse environments.”

7. Learning Keypoints from Synthetic Data for Robotic Cloth Folding arXiv (academic preprint by university robotics researchers)

   “Although significant progress has been made, cloth manipulation remains a challenging task in terms of perception and control”

8. SpeedFolding: Learning Efficient Bimanual Folding of Garments alphaXiv (arXiv paper 2208.10552, Avigal et al.) · 9 September 2022

   “After learning from 4300 human-annotated and self-supervised actions, the robot is able to fold garments from a random initial configuration in under 120s on average with a success rate of 93%.”

9. FabricFolding: learning efficient fabric folding without expert demonstrations | Robotica | Cambridge Core Cambridge University Press (Robotica journal) · 4 April 2024

   “Specifically, our method achieves a coverage rate of 0.822 and a success rate of 0.88 for long-sleeved T-shirts folding.”

10. Folding laundry: Humanoid Robot Evidence humanoidversus · 19 March 2024

    “The EVE update includes shirt folding. The maker's video description says all actions are autonomous and shown at normal speed; no fold-quality or repeatability metric is given.”

11. Folding laundry: Humanoid Robot Evidence humanoidversus · 15 January 2024

    “Electrek quotes Tesla engineer Milan Kovac describing teleoperation for dexterity verification and training-data collection.”

Reasoning

Before August 2024, research papers showed robots folding towels and garments in lab settings, including 93% success on garments in SpeedFolding (E8) and 88% on long-sleeved T-shirts in FabricFolding (E9), plus earlier towel-folding work (E1, E2). A humanoid maker's March 2024 update showed autonomous shirt folding but gave no figures for quality or repeatability (E10). Researchers described cloth manipulation as still challenging and said generalisation was limited (E6, E7). None of the evidence shows deployed or commercial systems that reliably fold everyday clothes, so general capability was still absent, but the remark glosses over credible research demos.

Cite this claim

Nate Silver, “In August 2024, Silver suggested, as a rhetorical question, that AI still could not fold clothes or do laundry.” (said 13 August 2024). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_acab987c84e9, method 0.1.0+28da144b. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_acab987c84e9