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Physical Intelligence (Physical Intelligence) is building a foundation model that can control any robot to do any task — what the team describes as the GPT moment for robotics. The company's cross-embodiment approach trains across many different robot platforms, and recent results show tasks being performed zero-shot that last...

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117,359 views • 4 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Robots can already fold laundry, make espresso, clean kitchens, and assemble things. The harder problem is getting them to do those tasks reliably, for long periods of time, without a human babysitting them. At Startup School 2026, Physical Intelligence cofounder Chelsea Finn explains what it takes to build general-purpose robots that work in the real world. She shares how reinforcement learning pushed robot throughput up 2x, how their systems can run autonomously for hours, and why she believes robotics is entering its GPT era: moving from specialized models toward general-purpose systems that can work across tasks, robots, and environments. 00:00 — The State of Physical Intelligence 01:23 — What It Takes to Make Robots Useful 05:11 — The Reliability Problem 07:43 — Reinforcement Learning for Robotics 09:35 — Learning From Failures 12:43 — Training Robots to Improve Themselves 14:21 — Can a Robot Work for 13 Hours Straight? 17:36 — Why Robots Need Memory 21:22 — Building a General-Purpose Robot 25:02 — From Fine-Tuning to Out-of-the-Box Models 27:35 — Training on All the Data 30:20 — One Model That Beats the Specialists 31:21 — Compositional Generalization 37:49 — The GPT Era of Robotics 39:49 — Q&A
58:17

Robots can already fold laundry, make espresso, clean kitchens, and assemble things. The harder problem is getting them to do those tasks reliably, for long periods of time, without a human babysitting them. At Startup School 2026, Physical Intelligence cofounder Chelsea Finn explains what it takes to build general-purpose robots that work in the real world. She shares how reinforcement learning pushed robot throughput up 2x, how their systems can run autonomously for hours, and why she believes robotics is entering its GPT era: moving from specialized models toward general-purpose systems that can work across tasks, robots, and environments. 00:00 — The State of Physical Intelligence 01:23 — What It Takes to Make Robots Useful 05:11 — The Reliability Problem 07:43 — Reinforcement Learning for Robotics 09:35 — Learning From Failures 12:43 — Training Robots to Improve Themselves 14:21 — Can a Robot Work for 13 Hours Straight? 17:36 — Why Robots Need Memory 21:22 — Building a General-Purpose Robot 25:02 — From Fine-Tuning to Out-of-the-Box Models 27:35 — Training on All the Data 30:20 — One Model That Beats the Specialists 31:21 — Compositional Generalization 37:49 — The GPT Era of Robotics 39:49 — Q&A

Y Combinator

105,935 views • 17 days ago

My conversation with Sergey Levine (Sergey Levine). Sergey is the co-founder of Physical Intelligence -- a company building foundation models that can control any robot to do any task in any environment. The company's thesis is that generality is more scalable than specialization, meaning that a model trained across many different robots and tasks will ultimately outperform any system built to do one thing well (eg, just wash dishes). Sergey is a researcher by background, but I think you will appreciate how practical and commercially grounded this conversation is. We discuss: - Why changing a diaper will be the last task a robot masters - The simulation v. real-world data debate - How multimodal LLMs give robots common sense - Moravec's Paradox + Robot Olympics - Why robots can do long-horizon tasks now - A realistic timeline for robots in our homes I should note that I am an investor in Physical Intelligence -- I made the investment because I believe it is one of the most important companies tackling the problem of robotics. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:39 Defining Physical Intelligence 5:19 The Challenge of Building General Models 6:34 The Stakes and Future of General Purpose Robotics 8:15 Pros and Cons of Humanoid Robots 10:12 Historical Milestones in Robotics Research 15:31 Combining Generative AI and Deep RL 21:24 Moravec's Paradox 25:33 Kitchen Robots 29:30 Simulation vs. Real-World Data 30:48 The Robot Olympics 36:31 The Physiological Reality of Embodiment 38:56 Controversies in the Robotics Community 44:18 What Makes a Great Researcher 48:27 How Businesses Should Prepare for Robotics 54:09 Tracking Progress Through Research Papers 57:02 The Next Step: Mid-Level Reasoning 1:02:00 The Kindest Thing
1:15:15

My conversation with Sergey Levine (Sergey Levine). Sergey is the co-founder of Physical Intelligence -- a company building foundation models that can control any robot to do any task in any environment. The company's thesis is that generality is more scalable than specialization, meaning that a model trained across many different robots and tasks will ultimately outperform any system built to do one thing well (eg, just wash dishes). Sergey is a researcher by background, but I think you will appreciate how practical and commercially grounded this conversation is. We discuss: - Why changing a diaper will be the last task a robot masters - The simulation v. real-world data debate - How multimodal LLMs give robots common sense - Moravec's Paradox + Robot Olympics - Why robots can do long-horizon tasks now - A realistic timeline for robots in our homes I should note that I am an investor in Physical Intelligence -- I made the investment because I believe it is one of the most important companies tackling the problem of robotics. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:39 Defining Physical Intelligence 5:19 The Challenge of Building General Models 6:34 The Stakes and Future of General Purpose Robotics 8:15 Pros and Cons of Humanoid Robots 10:12 Historical Milestones in Robotics Research 15:31 Combining Generative AI and Deep RL 21:24 Moravec's Paradox 25:33 Kitchen Robots 29:30 Simulation vs. Real-World Data 30:48 The Robot Olympics 36:31 The Physiological Reality of Embodiment 38:56 Controversies in the Robotics Community 44:18 What Makes a Great Researcher 48:27 How Businesses Should Prepare for Robotics 54:09 Tracking Progress Through Research Papers 57:02 The Next Step: Mid-Level Reasoning 1:02:00 The Kindest Thing

Patrick OShaughnessy

133,833 views • 5 months ago

Karol Hausman is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence, a robotics company building a general-purpose “AI brain for the physical world.” The company has raised more than $1 billion in funding to develop foundation models that allow robots to operate across many machines, environments, and tasks rather than being programmed for a single purpose. In our conversation, we explore: • The moment a lecture from Sergey Levine convinced him to abandon his PhD research direction and pivot fully to deep learning • The case for building a general “AI brain” for the physical world rather than a single specialized robot • The role of real-world data in training robots, the limits of simulation, and how deployment could create a powerful data flywheel • The unique challenges of physical intelligence and why robots must operate with far higher reliability than language models Thank you to the partners who make this possible - Brex: The intelligent finance platform: - Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings: Timestamps (00:00) Intro (04:05) Karol’s early fascination with robots (18:21) Karol’s entry point to robotics and PhD program (25:49) Combining robotics with LLMs: The Taylor Swift demo (30:48) The 1970s SHRDLU AI experiment (39:40) How research shapes what Physical Intelligence builds (49:07) The return of reinforcement learning in robotics (1:00:00) NVIDIA’s simulation engines (1:07:31) Compensating for missing senses
1:14:20

Karol Hausman is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence, a robotics company building a general-purpose “AI brain for the physical world.” The company has raised more than $1 billion in funding to develop foundation models that allow robots to operate across many machines, environments, and tasks rather than being programmed for a single purpose. In our conversation, we explore: • The moment a lecture from Sergey Levine convinced him to abandon his PhD research direction and pivot fully to deep learning • The case for building a general “AI brain” for the physical world rather than a single specialized robot • The role of real-world data in training robots, the limits of simulation, and how deployment could create a powerful data flywheel • The unique challenges of physical intelligence and why robots must operate with far higher reliability than language models Thank you to the partners who make this possible - Brex: The intelligent finance platform: - Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings: Timestamps (00:00) Intro (04:05) Karol’s early fascination with robots (18:21) Karol’s entry point to robotics and PhD program (25:49) Combining robotics with LLMs: The Taylor Swift demo (30:48) The 1970s SHRDLU AI experiment (39:40) How research shapes what Physical Intelligence builds (49:07) The return of reinforcement learning in robotics (1:00:00) NVIDIA’s simulation engines (1:07:31) Compensating for missing senses

Mario Gabriele 🦊

27,871 views • 5 months ago

My full conversation with Andrew Kang 2:36 Pivoting to robotics from crypto 11:46 Kang asks: Why are you trading? 24:14 Robotics' ChatGPT moment 28:44 GPT-5 robots within a year 33:04 A robot in every home 41:09 Big Tech is lagging 54:43 Where the real moat is 1:02:40 Building MicroStrategy for robots 1:08:00 How retail can access Robotics 1:19:23 The SoftBank playbook
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My full conversation with Andrew Kang 2:36 Pivoting to robotics from crypto 11:46 Kang asks: Why are you trading? 24:14 Robotics' ChatGPT moment 28:44 GPT-5 robots within a year 33:04 A robot in every home 41:09 Big Tech is lagging 54:43 Where the real moat is 1:02:40 Building MicroStrategy for robots 1:08:00 How retail can access Robotics 1:19:23 The SoftBank playbook

threadguy

75,691 views • 2 months ago

Chelsea Finn (Chelsea Finn) on building general-purpose robotics, and bringing intelligence into the physical world. At AI Startup School in San Francisco. 00:00 - General Purpose Robots 00:11 - Challenges in Robotics Applications 00:57 - Physical Intelligence: A New Approach 01:47 - Learning from Language Models 02:08 - Data Sources for Training Robots 03:32 - Training with Real-World Data 04:39 - Initial Successes and Challenges 09:10 - Breakthrough in Robot Training 11:03 - Improving Performance 15:43 - Expanding Capabilities 17:34 - Robots in Unseen Environments 25:54 - Handling Open-Ended Prompts 29:36 - Evaluating Robot Performance 30:03 - Future Directions and Challenges 31:27 - Audience Q&A
44:52

Chelsea Finn (Chelsea Finn) on building general-purpose robotics, and bringing intelligence into the physical world. At AI Startup School in San Francisco. 00:00 - General Purpose Robots 00:11 - Challenges in Robotics Applications 00:57 - Physical Intelligence: A New Approach 01:47 - Learning from Language Models 02:08 - Data Sources for Training Robots 03:32 - Training with Real-World Data 04:39 - Initial Successes and Challenges 09:10 - Breakthrough in Robot Training 11:03 - Improving Performance 15:43 - Expanding Capabilities 17:34 - Robots in Unseen Environments 25:54 - Handling Open-Ended Prompts 29:36 - Evaluating Robot Performance 30:03 - Future Directions and Challenges 31:27 - Audience Q&A

Y Combinator

129,834 views • 1 year ago

Is Physical AI the Next Frontier for Digital Assets? with EtherMage founder of Virtuals Protocol Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:15 Virtuals Protocol Recap 05:30 From Digital Agents to Robots 09:00 Eastworlds Launch Explained 12:20 Tele-Operation Pilots Live Now 15:40 Three Reasons Digital Assets Fits with Robotics 20:10 Data Collection & Token Incentives 24:30 Robot-to-Robot Commerce Vision 28:00 What's Missing From the Stack 29:15 Privacy in Physical AI
31:23

Is Physical AI the Next Frontier for Digital Assets? with EtherMage founder of Virtuals Protocol Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:15 Virtuals Protocol Recap 05:30 From Digital Agents to Robots 09:00 Eastworlds Launch Explained 12:20 Tele-Operation Pilots Live Now 15:40 Three Reasons Digital Assets Fits with Robotics 20:10 Data Collection & Token Incentives 24:30 Robot-to-Robot Commerce Vision 28:00 What's Missing From the Stack 29:15 Privacy in Physical AI

The Rollup

17,067 views • 4 months ago

World Labs CEO Dr. Fei-Fei Li & SceniX Co-Founder Yunzhu Li on the data bottleneck in robotics and how world models help: "The lack of data in training, the lack of data in evaluation, this is very, very different from language models, where data is abundant on the internet." "And we know that in order for robotics to work, we have to somehow unlock the power of scaling law. But where does that come from?" "It's a profound problem that everybody's battling with in robotics." "We see a lot of unlock in being able to do this whole process through the modeling of the environments." "Being able to create these digital worlds... that's just going to unlock so much more potential for being able to replace all the costly and the unsafe data in the real environments with the data generated from the worlds for robots to be able to do scalable learning and evaluations." Fei-Fei Li Yunzhu Li martin_casado
1:49

World Labs CEO Dr. Fei-Fei Li & SceniX Co-Founder Yunzhu Li on the data bottleneck in robotics and how world models help: "The lack of data in training, the lack of data in evaluation, this is very, very different from language models, where data is abundant on the internet." "And we know that in order for robotics to work, we have to somehow unlock the power of scaling law. But where does that come from?" "It's a profound problem that everybody's battling with in robotics." "We see a lot of unlock in being able to do this whole process through the modeling of the environments." "Being able to create these digital worlds... that's just going to unlock so much more potential for being able to replace all the costly and the unsafe data in the real environments with the data generated from the worlds for robots to be able to do scalable learning and evaluations." Fei-Fei Li Yunzhu Li martin_casado

a16z

76,010 views • 1 month ago

We profiled the most hyped robotics company in the world. Inside Physical Intelligence with Co-founder Lachy Groom Exclusive interview in the Physical Intelligence robotics lab, who’re backed by top investors to build robots which work in the real world. Not just scripted environments. We cover: 0:00 So…What is Physical Intelligence? 1:41 Why can’t we solve Marovec’s Paradox? 2:33 Live Demo: Meet the Machines 4:17 Why robots still struggle today… 6:14 Meet PI’s Investors (Thrive Capital) 7:19 Teaming up with the mega-brilliant co-founder group of Karol Haussman, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Brian Ichter, Adnan Esmail & Quan Vuong 9:20 PI’s Robot Capabilities 11:37 How are they making intelligent robots? 13:43 The Future Impact of Everyday Robots 15:49 Jeff Bezos Investment in Physical Intelligence 16:43 What will the next 1-3 years look like? 17:54 Revealing PI’s Work Culture 19:23 Outro
21:38

We profiled the most hyped robotics company in the world. Inside Physical Intelligence with Co-founder Lachy Groom Exclusive interview in the Physical Intelligence robotics lab, who’re backed by top investors to build robots which work in the real world. Not just scripted environments. We cover: 0:00 So…What is Physical Intelligence? 1:41 Why can’t we solve Marovec’s Paradox? 2:33 Live Demo: Meet the Machines 4:17 Why robots still struggle today… 6:14 Meet PI’s Investors (Thrive Capital) 7:19 Teaming up with the mega-brilliant co-founder group of Karol Haussman, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Brian Ichter, Adnan Esmail & Quan Vuong 9:20 PI’s Robot Capabilities 11:37 How are they making intelligent robots? 13:43 The Future Impact of Everyday Robots 15:49 Jeff Bezos Investment in Physical Intelligence 16:43 What will the next 1-3 years look like? 17:54 Revealing PI’s Work Culture 19:23 Outro

Sachin Shah

119,550 views • 7 months ago

JUST IN: Dyna Robotics just published one of the most important research papers in robotics this year. It could fundamentally change how robot foundation models are trained. A scaling law that transfers from human video to robot performance. Dyna-2 is out and it's 🔥 Here's what that means in plain terms. Dyna-2 was pre-trained on ONE MILLION hours of egocentric human video, 170 years of continuous human experience, cooking, folding, assembling, cleaning. And as that human data scaled, robot performance improved. Predictably. Monotonically. Across 39 tasks on two different robot embodiments the model had never seen. → 1,000 hours pre-training → 20% normalised task performance → 10,000 hours → 28% → 100,000 hours → 45% → 1,000,000 hours → 53% Human video exists at effectively unlimited scale. Every cook, every factory worker, every craftsperson wearing a camera is generating training data for future robots. But the finding that stunned even the researchers, world modeling is what makes the transfer work. A model trained to predict future video AND actions massively outperforms one trained on actions alone. Video is the new scaling axis for robotics. One more jaw-dropping data point. 13 minutes of teleoperation data was enough to fine-tune Dyna-2 to open a bottle cap using two five-fingered robot hands. The robots are coming, and they're learning from us directly :D Read more here: Congrats Jason Ma and team! ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
1:35

JUST IN: Dyna Robotics just published one of the most important research papers in robotics this year. It could fundamentally change how robot foundation models are trained. A scaling law that transfers from human video to robot performance. Dyna-2 is out and it's 🔥 Here's what that means in plain terms. Dyna-2 was pre-trained on ONE MILLION hours of egocentric human video, 170 years of continuous human experience, cooking, folding, assembling, cleaning. And as that human data scaled, robot performance improved. Predictably. Monotonically. Across 39 tasks on two different robot embodiments the model had never seen. → 1,000 hours pre-training → 20% normalised task performance → 10,000 hours → 28% → 100,000 hours → 45% → 1,000,000 hours → 53% Human video exists at effectively unlimited scale. Every cook, every factory worker, every craftsperson wearing a camera is generating training data for future robots. But the finding that stunned even the researchers, world modeling is what makes the transfer work. A model trained to predict future video AND actions massively outperforms one trained on actions alone. Video is the new scaling axis for robotics. One more jaw-dropping data point. 13 minutes of teleoperation data was enough to fine-tune Dyna-2 to open a bottle cap using two five-fingered robot hands. The robots are coming, and they're learning from us directly :D Read more here: Congrats Jason Ma and team! ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

23,556 views • 19 days ago

.Sergey Levine is one of the world's leading robotics researchers (and co-founder of Physical Intelligence). He thinks fully autonomous robots are much closer than people realize - when I pushed him on a prediction, he said 5 years to robots that can autonomously run your household). The big game changer, in his view, is that we finally have LLMs with common sense and prior knowledge that we can scaffold the robot models around. We get into all the reasons this might not happen, the data flywheel from deployment, architecture, simulation, manufacturing, and much more. Enjoy! 0:00:00 – Timeline to widely deployed autonomous robots 0:22:12 – Why robotics will scale faster than self-driving cars 0:32:15 – How vision-language-action models work 0:50:26 – Improvements needed for brainlike efficiency 1:02:48 – Learning from simulation 1:14:08 – How much will robots speed up AI buildouts? 1:22:54 – If hardware’s the bottleneck, does China win by default?
1:33:14

.Sergey Levine is one of the world's leading robotics researchers (and co-founder of Physical Intelligence). He thinks fully autonomous robots are much closer than people realize - when I pushed him on a prediction, he said 5 years to robots that can autonomously run your household). The big game changer, in his view, is that we finally have LLMs with common sense and prior knowledge that we can scaffold the robot models around. We get into all the reasons this might not happen, the data flywheel from deployment, architecture, simulation, manufacturing, and much more. Enjoy! 0:00:00 – Timeline to widely deployed autonomous robots 0:22:12 – Why robotics will scale faster than self-driving cars 0:32:15 – How vision-language-action models work 0:50:26 – Improvements needed for brainlike efficiency 1:02:48 – Learning from simulation 1:14:08 – How much will robots speed up AI buildouts? 1:22:54 – If hardware’s the bottleneck, does China win by default?

Dwarkesh Patel

211,158 views • 11 months ago

1/ New episode – Enabling AI Models to Drive Robots with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc from BitRobot 🦾 Hosts: Connor Lovely 🎬 EV3 Sal We discuss: - Building the world's largest robotic driving dataset - Working with researchers from Google DeepMind - Launching a memecoin ($SAM) pre-TGE Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:47 - Intersection of Robotics and AI 02:50 - Real-World Evaluation vs. Digital AI 06:00 - The Importance of Real-World Testing 07:07 - Mapping and Navigation in Robotics 08:12 - Value of Real-World Data for AI 09:38 - Differences in Data Utility 13:07 - Exploring Different Robotic Form Factors 14:04 - Cross-Embodiment in Robotics 16:35 - Introduction to BitRobot 17:30 - Transition from Frotobots to BitRobot 22:05 - Future Plans for BitRobot 24:27 - Meme Coins in Community Building 27:46 - Conclusion Watch on all platforms below ⬇️
29:16

1/ New episode – Enabling AI Models to Drive Robots with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc from BitRobot 🦾 Hosts: Connor Lovely 🎬 EV3 Sal We discuss: - Building the world's largest robotic driving dataset - Working with researchers from Google DeepMind - Launching a memecoin ($SAM) pre-TGE Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:47 - Intersection of Robotics and AI 02:50 - Real-World Evaluation vs. Digital AI 06:00 - The Importance of Real-World Testing 07:07 - Mapping and Navigation in Robotics 08:12 - Value of Real-World Data for AI 09:38 - Differences in Data Utility 13:07 - Exploring Different Robotic Form Factors 14:04 - Cross-Embodiment in Robotics 16:35 - Introduction to BitRobot 17:30 - Transition from Frotobots to BitRobot 22:05 - Future Plans for BitRobot 24:27 - Meme Coins in Community Building 27:46 - Conclusion Watch on all platforms below ⬇️

Proof of Coverage | Tech’s Creative Agency

10,748 views • 1 year ago

Founder and CEO of The Bot Company Kyle Vogt—who also cofounded Twitch and Cruise—shares a pint and discusses robots doing your household chores, the autonomy industry, Tesla vs Waymo, and how future $100b companies will look different. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:38 The Bot Company pitch 02:05 Single-task vs. multi-task robots 04:27 What is the Turing test for robotics? 05:52 Why this time is different for home robots 08:42 The last mile in robotics and self-driving 09:47 Viral demos and hype cycles 10:38 Commercializing frontier tech 13:06 Self-driving CapEx 14:15 Regulatory hurdles 16:18 Tesla vs. Waymo 19:21 Why Kyle regrets selling Cruise 21:39 The next $100 billion company Podcast on Spotify/YouTube/etc too!
22:30

Founder and CEO of The Bot Company Kyle Vogt—who also cofounded Twitch and Cruise—shares a pint and discusses robots doing your household chores, the autonomy industry, Tesla vs Waymo, and how future $100b companies will look different. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:38 The Bot Company pitch 02:05 Single-task vs. multi-task robots 04:27 What is the Turing test for robotics? 05:52 Why this time is different for home robots 08:42 The last mile in robotics and self-driving 09:47 Viral demos and hype cycles 10:38 Commercializing frontier tech 13:06 Self-driving CapEx 14:15 Regulatory hurdles 16:18 Tesla vs. Waymo 19:21 Why Kyle regrets selling Cruise 21:39 The next $100 billion company Podcast on Spotify/YouTube/etc too!

John Collison

104,597 views • 1 year ago

We might be solving the wrong problem in robotics. That’s what this makes clear. UMI → Universal Manipulation Interface A simple $400 gripper that lets you teach robots by demonstration. You hold it like a tool. Show the task. The robot learns. No teleoperation. No expensive hardware. No robot-specific data. Stanford open-sourced everything → hardware, code, datasets. What stands out to me is the bottleneck. Not algorithms. Data. Teleoperation → ~35 demos/hour UMI → ~111 demos/hour And the data transfers across robots → UR5, Franka, others. The design is surprisingly practical: → GoPro fisheye lens (155° FOV) + mirrors for depth → SLAM + IMU for precise 6DoF tracking → latency matching for dynamic tasks → diffusion policies for multimodal actions Then it scales. Cheng Chi takes this further with Sunday Robotics (with Tony Zhao). A $200 glove → deployed in 500+ homes → ~10 million real-world interactions. Not lab data. Real human behavior. Their robot learns dishes, laundry, espresso → with zero robot-specific data. This is where the shift becomes obvious. From training robots in controlled environments → to learning directly from humans at scale So here’s the real question: Will robotics be unlocked by better models… or by unlocking data? #ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #AI #Innovation #FutureOfWork
0:20

We might be solving the wrong problem in robotics. That’s what this makes clear. UMI → Universal Manipulation Interface A simple $400 gripper that lets you teach robots by demonstration. You hold it like a tool. Show the task. The robot learns. No teleoperation. No expensive hardware. No robot-specific data. Stanford open-sourced everything → hardware, code, datasets. What stands out to me is the bottleneck. Not algorithms. Data. Teleoperation → ~35 demos/hour UMI → ~111 demos/hour And the data transfers across robots → UR5, Franka, others. The design is surprisingly practical: → GoPro fisheye lens (155° FOV) + mirrors for depth → SLAM + IMU for precise 6DoF tracking → latency matching for dynamic tasks → diffusion policies for multimodal actions Then it scales. Cheng Chi takes this further with Sunday Robotics (with Tony Zhao). A $200 glove → deployed in 500+ homes → ~10 million real-world interactions. Not lab data. Real human behavior. Their robot learns dishes, laundry, espresso → with zero robot-specific data. This is where the shift becomes obvious. From training robots in controlled environments → to learning directly from humans at scale So here’s the real question: Will robotics be unlocked by better models… or by unlocking data? #ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #AI #Innovation #FutureOfWork

Pascal Bornet

186,670 views • 4 months ago

Godfather of AI Yann LeCun reveals the humanoid robot industry's secret: the companies building the robots have no idea how to make them smart enough to be useful. "There is a lot of expectations that robotics is going to be a revolution, essentially, in a big market, eventually." "But the secret of the industry is that none of the companies at the moment that are building robots, like humanoid robots, none of those companies has any idea how to make those robots smart enough to be useful." "There's a big push for AI to make progress towards... understanding the physical world. That's what is prompting this investment." "There's nothing wrong with investing in LLMs. LLMs are useful. They're just addressing a completely different set of applications, really." LeCun is not describing someone else's problem. He has spent 15 years on world models, raised more than $1 billion for AMI Labs to build that missing intelligence layer, and in the same interview he calls 2026 the year of the world model and puts consumer robots 3 to 5 years out. Every humanoid robot demo you have seen is a body waiting for a brain. The winner in robotics will not be the company that shipped the body; it will be the one that ships the intelligence. - Yann LeCun (Yann LeCun), Turing Award winner and founder of AMI Labs, on Bloomberg Television.
1:01

Godfather of AI Yann LeCun reveals the humanoid robot industry's secret: the companies building the robots have no idea how to make them smart enough to be useful. "There is a lot of expectations that robotics is going to be a revolution, essentially, in a big market, eventually." "But the secret of the industry is that none of the companies at the moment that are building robots, like humanoid robots, none of those companies has any idea how to make those robots smart enough to be useful." "There's a big push for AI to make progress towards... understanding the physical world. That's what is prompting this investment." "There's nothing wrong with investing in LLMs. LLMs are useful. They're just addressing a completely different set of applications, really." LeCun is not describing someone else's problem. He has spent 15 years on world models, raised more than $1 billion for AMI Labs to build that missing intelligence layer, and in the same interview he calls 2026 the year of the world model and puts consumer robots 3 to 5 years out. Every humanoid robot demo you have seen is a body waiting for a brain. The winner in robotics will not be the company that shipped the body; it will be the one that ships the intelligence. - Yann LeCun (Yann LeCun), Turing Award winner and founder of AMI Labs, on Bloomberg Television.

Karl Mehta

44,425 views • 1 month ago

Eka means unity -- “one,” in Sanskrit and “first” in Finnish. We’re building intelligence for the physical world in its native language: forces. Until now, robotics faced a tradeoff — generality or speed. The real world requires both. Robotics also faced a data problem. Our Vision–Force–Action (VFA) model — the first of its kind — breaks the generality-speed tradeoff and the data barrier. It's a new foundation uniting performance, generality, and safety for putting capable robots in everyone's hands. Today, I am excited to share our journey of pushing robots beyond human limits. Today, dexterity becomes scalable. Today, I welcome you to the Era of Eka. Co-founded with Tuomas Haarnoja, and so thrilled and grateful to be working with a dream team at Eka Robotics, Inc.. Learn more:
0:26

Eka means unity -- “one,” in Sanskrit and “first” in Finnish. We’re building intelligence for the physical world in its native language: forces. Until now, robotics faced a tradeoff — generality or speed. The real world requires both. Robotics also faced a data problem. Our Vision–Force–Action (VFA) model — the first of its kind — breaks the generality-speed tradeoff and the data barrier. It's a new foundation uniting performance, generality, and safety for putting capable robots in everyone's hands. Today, I am excited to share our journey of pushing robots beyond human limits. Today, dexterity becomes scalable. Today, I welcome you to the Era of Eka. Co-founded with Tuomas Haarnoja, and so thrilled and grateful to be working with a dream team at Eka Robotics, Inc.. Learn more:

Pulkit Agrawal

340,090 views • 4 months ago

My conversation with Kanishka Rao, who went from working on particle physics at CERN to driving robotics at Google DeepMind. We get into the Gemini Robotics 2 release, trending training recipes in the industry, physical AGI, world models, and more. 1:00 Intro 1:47 Does AI's pace feel crazy? 4:04 From particle physics PHD to robotics 6:03 Speech recognition's deep learning moment 8:43 Whole-body humanoid control 10:47 The trash-bag tying demo 13:07 The robotics data pyramid 14:13 Transferring skills across robots 16:30 How does Motion Transfer work 16:56 Why a separate reasoning model 19:02 Can distillation work in robotics? 20:02 The ASIMOV safety benchmark 22:47 VLAs vs world models 25:10 The missing tactile sensing piece 27:48 How far to physical AGI? 30:07 Fundamental breakthrough needed? 31:53 World models for evaluation 33:45 Will the model layer commoditize? 35:11 Humanoid as a form factor
38:27

My conversation with Kanishka Rao, who went from working on particle physics at CERN to driving robotics at Google DeepMind. We get into the Gemini Robotics 2 release, trending training recipes in the industry, physical AGI, world models, and more. 1:00 Intro 1:47 Does AI's pace feel crazy? 4:04 From particle physics PHD to robotics 6:03 Speech recognition's deep learning moment 8:43 Whole-body humanoid control 10:47 The trash-bag tying demo 13:07 The robotics data pyramid 14:13 Transferring skills across robots 16:30 How does Motion Transfer work 16:56 Why a separate reasoning model 19:02 Can distillation work in robotics? 20:02 The ASIMOV safety benchmark 22:47 VLAs vs world models 25:10 The missing tactile sensing piece 27:48 How far to physical AGI? 30:07 Fundamental breakthrough needed? 31:53 World models for evaluation 33:45 Will the model layer commoditize? 35:11 Humanoid as a form factor

The Humanoid Hub

17,217 views • 1 month ago

New Episode: Carolina Parada leads the robotics team at Google DeepMind. Carolina believes in a future with a broad, rich ecosystem of diverse robot types, where AI is smart enough to embody any robot. We discuss her journey, advancements in Gemini Robotics 1.5, cross-embodiment transfer, RL versus imitation, humanoids, world models, scaling laws, societal concerns, and more. 1:17 Introduction 1:38 Career journey and inspirations 3:50 Reaction to the 2022 ChatGPT launch 4:53 Google DeepMind's robotics mission 9:13 Key upgrades in Gemini Robotics 1.5 14:06 Agentic system's web usage 15:33 Robotics data-gathering methods 16:57 VLA vs. reasoning model training differences 18:22 Convergence of action and reasoning models 19:35 Cross-embodiment transfer 22:34 Learning directly from humans 24:20 Generalization challenges 27:01 Imitation versus reinforcement learning 28:51 Use of world models in robotics 30:31 Applications and testing of Gemini Robotics 1.5 33:04 Do humanoids deserve special focus? 35:06 Home humanoids timeline & limiting factors 37:19 Scaling laws in robotics versus self-driving 38:46 Value of learning classical robotics approaches 40:38 Ethical issues and societal impact
43:58

New Episode: Carolina Parada leads the robotics team at Google DeepMind. Carolina believes in a future with a broad, rich ecosystem of diverse robot types, where AI is smart enough to embody any robot. We discuss her journey, advancements in Gemini Robotics 1.5, cross-embodiment transfer, RL versus imitation, humanoids, world models, scaling laws, societal concerns, and more. 1:17 Introduction 1:38 Career journey and inspirations 3:50 Reaction to the 2022 ChatGPT launch 4:53 Google DeepMind's robotics mission 9:13 Key upgrades in Gemini Robotics 1.5 14:06 Agentic system's web usage 15:33 Robotics data-gathering methods 16:57 VLA vs. reasoning model training differences 18:22 Convergence of action and reasoning models 19:35 Cross-embodiment transfer 22:34 Learning directly from humans 24:20 Generalization challenges 27:01 Imitation versus reinforcement learning 28:51 Use of world models in robotics 30:31 Applications and testing of Gemini Robotics 1.5 33:04 Do humanoids deserve special focus? 35:06 Home humanoids timeline & limiting factors 37:19 Scaling laws in robotics versus self-driving 38:46 Value of learning classical robotics approaches 40:38 Ethical issues and societal impact

The Humanoid Hub

71,481 views • 10 months ago

Today we're launching Hebbian Robotics (YC S26) Hebbian Robotics (YC S26) . We build APIs for evaluating data quality, without training a robotics model. Data vendors use our API to search and analyze Physical AI data at scale, getting on-demand quality signals and metrics without managing infrastructure. High-quality data is the bottleneck to the next frontier of intelligence in robotics. Buyers want data they can trust. Data providers are focused on operational excellence. They don't have the bandwidth to understand the quality of their data at scale. We're fixing this. Vendors use our APIs to understand the impact of their decisions on their data quality: - Buyers demanding per-collector hour limits? Prove compliance while we stay ahead of the workarounds. - Changed your collection SOPs? Monitor for quality drift and regression. - Suspect duplicate samples? Verify with a single API call. Before Hebbian, I trained AI models for industrial cleaning robots, and kingston kuan spent years building large-scale infrastructure at Jane Street.
2:17

Today we're launching Hebbian Robotics (YC S26) Hebbian Robotics (YC S26) . We build APIs for evaluating data quality, without training a robotics model. Data vendors use our API to search and analyze Physical AI data at scale, getting on-demand quality signals and metrics without managing infrastructure. High-quality data is the bottleneck to the next frontier of intelligence in robotics. Buyers want data they can trust. Data providers are focused on operational excellence. They don't have the bandwidth to understand the quality of their data at scale. We're fixing this. Vendors use our APIs to understand the impact of their decisions on their data quality: - Buyers demanding per-collector hour limits? Prove compliance while we stay ahead of the workarounds. - Changed your collection SOPs? Monitor for quality drift and regression. - Suspect duplicate samples? Verify with a single API call. Before Hebbian, I trained AI models for industrial cleaning robots, and kingston kuan spent years building large-scale infrastructure at Jane Street.

Brandon Ong

165,680 views • 20 days ago

The world today is built for humans, & cities built for cars... The world tomorrow will be built around the evolution of robotics. It was a pleasure hosting this week's Robotics episode of the Super Cycle Pod with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc (BitRobot 🦾) & Nils of (Auki) have packed this full of insanely valuable insights: 0:00 - Intro + wen terminator? 5:13 - Robotics vs "GPT moment" 7:08 - Privacy in the world of robotics 11:40 - Web3 robotics + intro to frodobots / bitrobot 14:50 - Impact of $HNT on Michael and Nils 17:06 - Intro to $AUKI 19:26 - Why does dePIN as an investable asset suck? 25:36 - $AUKI community building philosophy 28:30 - Bitrobot mission w/ PhD researchers 31:40 - Bitrobot subnet structure 35:28 - Bitrobot value accrual + Impact 39:40 - $AUKI and proving people wrong 42:20 - Robotics is the biggest industry in the world 50:16 - Dangers of physical AI 55:25 - Human Philosophy in Physical AI 57:05 - How cities will change w/ robots 1:03:20 - Skills of the future 1:06:32 - Responsibility as innovators in robotics Where do you think we are in the robotics cycle? My DMs are open to teams wanting to chat about what they're building.
1:10:20

The world today is built for humans, & cities built for cars... The world tomorrow will be built around the evolution of robotics. It was a pleasure hosting this week's Robotics episode of the Super Cycle Pod with Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc (BitRobot 🦾) & Nils of (Auki) have packed this full of insanely valuable insights: 0:00 - Intro + wen terminator? 5:13 - Robotics vs "GPT moment" 7:08 - Privacy in the world of robotics 11:40 - Web3 robotics + intro to frodobots / bitrobot 14:50 - Impact of $HNT on Michael and Nils 17:06 - Intro to $AUKI 19:26 - Why does dePIN as an investable asset suck? 25:36 - $AUKI community building philosophy 28:30 - Bitrobot mission w/ PhD researchers 31:40 - Bitrobot subnet structure 35:28 - Bitrobot value accrual + Impact 39:40 - $AUKI and proving people wrong 42:20 - Robotics is the biggest industry in the world 50:16 - Dangers of physical AI 55:25 - Human Philosophy in Physical AI 57:05 - How cities will change w/ robots 1:03:20 - Skills of the future 1:06:32 - Responsibility as innovators in robotics Where do you think we are in the robotics cycle? My DMs are open to teams wanting to chat about what they're building.

0xSammy

60,544 views • 9 months ago