LG’s CLOid: The Zero-Labor Home Dream or a Robot That Can’t Even Open a Fridge?

LG’s CLOid robot promises a zero-labor home, but at CES 2024, it stumbled more than it soared—selecting milk from a fridge took longer than brushing teeth.

LG announced CLOid, an AI-powered home robot designed for tasks like laundry, breakfast prep, and home patrol during CES 2024. The company described it as an "evolving into an ambient-care agent that supports everyday life."

CLOid uses a vision language model to convert images/video into structured understanding and execute verbal commands. While it competes with Amazon’s Astro and Enabot’s EBO X, CLOid includes arms for physical interaction.

However, its demo performance revealed significant limitations—tasks like selecting milk from a fridge took excessive time, raising questions about its practicality.

The product remains "under development" with no commercial release date announced. LG’s "Zero Labor Home" ecosystem ties CLOid to AI appliances like an AI refrigerator and recipe-identifying oven, but the robot’s current capabilities fall short of the aspirational vision. A disclaimer on the demo read: "products shown are under development."

The Alignment Problem

The gap between CLOid’s marketing and its real-world performance highlights a broader challenge in AI robotics: translating lab demonstrations into reliable, scalable solutions.

For small business owners and early adopters, the absence of a commercial timeline and the robot’s current limitations suggest a long wait for a product that can truly automate household tasks.