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Today may be the ImageNet moment for robotics. RT-X: the largest open-source robot dataset ever compiled, across 33 institutes, 22 robot hardware, 527 skills, and 1M episodes. Why is robotics lagging so far behind NLP, vision, and other AI domains? Data scarcity is the main culprit to blame, among...

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Jim Fan

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265,034 views • 2 years ago •via X (Twitter)

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Something big is happening in robotics - and it’s hiding in plain sight. This post is not about dancing robots but in the data that powers them. Open robotics datasets have exploded this year, turning the field into a more scalable and collaborative ecosystem. In just two years, Hugging Face datasets grew from 11k to over 600k - and robotics is by far the fastest-growing segment. We went from 1k robotics datasets in 2024 to 27k in 2025! For comparison, text generation, the second-largest category, has only around 5k datasets in 2025. That gap is massive. Open datasets are important because robotics lives and dies by real-world robot data - video, actions, sensors, failures. By making this data easy to upload, reuse, and benchmark, researchers, startups, and large players are now releasing real-robot datasets that would have stayed locked inside labs just a few years ago. Major contributors include NVIDIA, LeRobot initiative, and a rapidly growing maker community. This surge is also enabled by cheaper video storage, better tooling, and an open-source AI culture now spilling into the physical world. And it really matters: open robotics data dramatically lowers entry barriers, accelerates learning-by-doing, and speeds up progress toward generalist and humanoid robots. Robotics won’t scale through hardware alone - but to a large extent through shared data. Viz below from AI World - link to the story and more viz/filters in comment.
0:11

Something big is happening in robotics - and it’s hiding in plain sight. This post is not about dancing robots but in the data that powers them. Open robotics datasets have exploded this year, turning the field into a more scalable and collaborative ecosystem. In just two years, Hugging Face datasets grew from 11k to over 600k - and robotics is by far the fastest-growing segment. We went from 1k robotics datasets in 2024 to 27k in 2025! For comparison, text generation, the second-largest category, has only around 5k datasets in 2025. That gap is massive. Open datasets are important because robotics lives and dies by real-world robot data - video, actions, sensors, failures. By making this data easy to upload, reuse, and benchmark, researchers, startups, and large players are now releasing real-robot datasets that would have stayed locked inside labs just a few years ago. Major contributors include NVIDIA, LeRobot initiative, and a rapidly growing maker community. This surge is also enabled by cheaper video storage, better tooling, and an open-source AI culture now spilling into the physical world. And it really matters: open robotics data dramatically lowers entry barriers, accelerates learning-by-doing, and speeds up progress toward generalist and humanoid robots. Robotics won’t scale through hardware alone - but to a large extent through shared data. Viz below from AI World - link to the story and more viz/filters in comment.

Pierre-Alexandre Balland

185,895 views • 6 months ago

A Letter to Our Community: The Road Ahead for Robotics To our Community and Partners, As we step into 2026, our mission at Axis is clearer than ever: Constructing the definitive End-to-End Scaling Layer for Robotics. Our goal is to accelerate the transfer of diverse human intelligence into Robotics General Intelligence (RGI). By owning the critical path of intelligence creation, we are turning the physical limitations of robotics into a scalable, software-driven future. Here is our strategic outlook and roadmap for the year ahead. The Core Thesis: Simulation is the Only Way Out The path to RGI is currently blocked by Data Scarcity, Generalization Fragility, and Hardware Fragmentation. At Axis, we believe Simulation is the only way out. Our Simulation Data Platform and Data Augmentation Engine transform raw data into "Synthetic Gold". Backed by academic milestones like Roboverse, Skill Blending, and GraspVLA, we have proven that pure simulation can achieve the generalization required for the real world. We don’t just collect data; we architect it. The Engine: Why Crypto? We believe RGI should come from all, not a few. Crypto is not just a feature; it is the primitive that powers our entire ecosystem flywheel: - Incentive Mechanism: Democratizing contribution and rewarding the trainers and developers. - Assetization: Turning proprietary data and refined models into liquid, ownable assets. - Verifiable Workflow: We are opening the "Black Box" of AI. By bringing total transparency to the Task Generation → Data Collection → Model Training pipeline, we ensure every byte of intelligence is verifiable, traceable, and secure. 2026 Strategic Deliverables This year, we are committed to delivering three foundational pillars: - The World's Largest Training Dataset for Robots: A robot training set—diverse, high-quality interaction data at an unprecedented scale. - A Robotics Foundation Model: A universal robotic brain trained on our pure simulation and synthetic data, capable of robust cross-embodiment transfer and open-world adaptability. - Evolvable Robot Hardware: Robots deployed with Axis models that autonomously evolve through continuous interaction, turning every deployment into a self-improving node within our RGI network. The Ultimate Vision We are building more than models; we are architecting the Distributed Machine Economy. A future where every dataset, model, and robotic embodiment is a verifiable asset in a global, autonomous network. Thank you for building the future of intelligence with us✌️📷
0:13

A Letter to Our Community: The Road Ahead for Robotics To our Community and Partners, As we step into 2026, our mission at Axis is clearer than ever: Constructing the definitive End-to-End Scaling Layer for Robotics. Our goal is to accelerate the transfer of diverse human intelligence into Robotics General Intelligence (RGI). By owning the critical path of intelligence creation, we are turning the physical limitations of robotics into a scalable, software-driven future. Here is our strategic outlook and roadmap for the year ahead. The Core Thesis: Simulation is the Only Way Out The path to RGI is currently blocked by Data Scarcity, Generalization Fragility, and Hardware Fragmentation. At Axis, we believe Simulation is the only way out. Our Simulation Data Platform and Data Augmentation Engine transform raw data into "Synthetic Gold". Backed by academic milestones like Roboverse, Skill Blending, and GraspVLA, we have proven that pure simulation can achieve the generalization required for the real world. We don’t just collect data; we architect it. The Engine: Why Crypto? We believe RGI should come from all, not a few. Crypto is not just a feature; it is the primitive that powers our entire ecosystem flywheel: - Incentive Mechanism: Democratizing contribution and rewarding the trainers and developers. - Assetization: Turning proprietary data and refined models into liquid, ownable assets. - Verifiable Workflow: We are opening the "Black Box" of AI. By bringing total transparency to the Task Generation → Data Collection → Model Training pipeline, we ensure every byte of intelligence is verifiable, traceable, and secure. 2026 Strategic Deliverables This year, we are committed to delivering three foundational pillars: - The World's Largest Training Dataset for Robots: A robot training set—diverse, high-quality interaction data at an unprecedented scale. - A Robotics Foundation Model: A universal robotic brain trained on our pure simulation and synthetic data, capable of robust cross-embodiment transfer and open-world adaptability. - Evolvable Robot Hardware: Robots deployed with Axis models that autonomously evolve through continuous interaction, turning every deployment into a self-improving node within our RGI network. The Ultimate Vision We are building more than models; we are architecting the Distributed Machine Economy. A future where every dataset, model, and robotic embodiment is a verifiable asset in a global, autonomous network. Thank you for building the future of intelligence with us✌️📷

Axis Robotics

27,858 views • 6 months ago

It's 2030 and you are reviewing humanoid robots. A Tesla. A Google. An Apple. An OpenAI. A Meta. A Figure. And a bunch of Chinese-made ones. Which one is best, and why? I think the Tesla understands the world much better. Why? There were eight Teslas around me on the freeway today. Start there. No other robot company has that data. But my robot is parked at the local high school twice a day. Its cameras see humans in all of our weirdness. How we move. Where we go. Where we walk. Who we talk with. What you are wearing. Whether your hair was combed this morning. That data will lead to robotics breakthroughs. Apple might keep up with its Vision Pro data, but it is too freaked out by the privacy implications of using said data. (On the front are six cameras and a couple of TOF -- Time Of Flight -- sensors that can see everything in your home in great detail). Google has a lot of data, for sure. All my: 1. Email. 2. Calendars. 3. Photos. 4. TV watching behavior. 5. Contacts. 6. Documents and spreadsheets. 7. Files. 8. Location data. So I expect Google's robot will be attractive to many. But how do you see the others shake out over the next five years? Make some guesses. But remember what an AI pioneer told me years ago about AI: it's all about the data. The Chinese ones have huge advantages: the Chinese have more data on their citizens, and many more citizens to boot AND they can make robots cheaper than we can. But now that you know OpenAI is building its own robot you have caught wind of what I've heard from many in San Francisco and Silicon Valley: that humanoid robots are the real prize of AI and will be highly profitable for those that can make them and find customers willing to buy them. Here, too, I learned long ago never to bet against Elon Musk. Will you?
0:16

It's 2030 and you are reviewing humanoid robots. A Tesla. A Google. An Apple. An OpenAI. A Meta. A Figure. And a bunch of Chinese-made ones. Which one is best, and why? I think the Tesla understands the world much better. Why? There were eight Teslas around me on the freeway today. Start there. No other robot company has that data. But my robot is parked at the local high school twice a day. Its cameras see humans in all of our weirdness. How we move. Where we go. Where we walk. Who we talk with. What you are wearing. Whether your hair was combed this morning. That data will lead to robotics breakthroughs. Apple might keep up with its Vision Pro data, but it is too freaked out by the privacy implications of using said data. (On the front are six cameras and a couple of TOF -- Time Of Flight -- sensors that can see everything in your home in great detail). Google has a lot of data, for sure. All my: 1. Email. 2. Calendars. 3. Photos. 4. TV watching behavior. 5. Contacts. 6. Documents and spreadsheets. 7. Files. 8. Location data. So I expect Google's robot will be attractive to many. But how do you see the others shake out over the next five years? Make some guesses. But remember what an AI pioneer told me years ago about AI: it's all about the data. The Chinese ones have huge advantages: the Chinese have more data on their citizens, and many more citizens to boot AND they can make robots cheaper than we can. But now that you know OpenAI is building its own robot you have caught wind of what I've heard from many in San Francisco and Silicon Valley: that humanoid robots are the real prize of AI and will be highly profitable for those that can make them and find customers willing to buy them. Here, too, I learned long ago never to bet against Elon Musk. Will you?

Robert Scoble

33,804 views • 1 year ago

🚨 BREAKING: NVIDIA just announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot. The first fully open humanoid robot reference design built on Jetson Thor, and it's going straight to the world's top research institutions. This is Jensen Huang's bet on open physical AI infrastructure. The hardware stack is serious: → Unitree H2 Plus chassis, 6 feet tall, 150 pounds, 31 degrees of freedom → Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, 22 degrees of freedom, bringing total to 75 across the full body → NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor onboard compute, 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, 128GB unified memory → Multi-view sensing, stereo head camera, wrist cameras, IMU Alongside this announcement, Unitree also introduced the H2 Plus as a standalone product, a frontier humanoid combining Unitree's own body, Sharpa's five-finger hands and NVIDIA Robotics Jetson Thor compute into one fully integrated research platform. The full Isaac GR00T software stack ships with it, teleoperation for data capture, open foundation models, Isaac Sim for training, Isaac Lab for evaluation, and accelerated ROS middleware for deployment. The complete loop from data to real-world robot in one unified platform. ETH Zürich, Stanford Robotics Center, UC San Diego and Ai2 are already on board as launch research partners. NVIDIA Robotics did to AI what it's now doing to robotics, build the platform, open the ecosystem, let the world build on top of it. Whoever owns the infrastructure layer wins. NVIDIA knows this better than anyone. 👀 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
0:14

🚨 BREAKING: NVIDIA just announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot. The first fully open humanoid robot reference design built on Jetson Thor, and it's going straight to the world's top research institutions. This is Jensen Huang's bet on open physical AI infrastructure. The hardware stack is serious: → Unitree H2 Plus chassis, 6 feet tall, 150 pounds, 31 degrees of freedom → Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, 22 degrees of freedom, bringing total to 75 across the full body → NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor onboard compute, 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, 128GB unified memory → Multi-view sensing, stereo head camera, wrist cameras, IMU Alongside this announcement, Unitree also introduced the H2 Plus as a standalone product, a frontier humanoid combining Unitree's own body, Sharpa's five-finger hands and NVIDIA Robotics Jetson Thor compute into one fully integrated research platform. The full Isaac GR00T software stack ships with it, teleoperation for data capture, open foundation models, Isaac Sim for training, Isaac Lab for evaluation, and accelerated ROS middleware for deployment. The complete loop from data to real-world robot in one unified platform. ETH Zürich, Stanford Robotics Center, UC San Diego and Ai2 are already on board as launch research partners. NVIDIA Robotics did to AI what it's now doing to robotics, build the platform, open the ecosystem, let the world build on top of it. Whoever owns the infrastructure layer wins. NVIDIA knows this better than anyone. 👀 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

15,928 views • 1 month ago

Qualia has been selected for the Google DeepMind Robotics Program. We train embodied models that put a robot on a real manual task and make it work, on the floor, not in a demo. Foundation models and reasoning are where robotics is heading, and doing that work alongside DeepMind, who are pushing this frontier, is exactly where we want to be. If you are a company looking to see how a new generation of robots can help your manual tasks, contact us at hello@qualiastudios.dev More soon
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Qualia has been selected for the Google DeepMind Robotics Program. We train embodied models that put a robot on a real manual task and make it work, on the floor, not in a demo. Foundation models and reasoning are where robotics is heading, and doing that work alongside DeepMind, who are pushing this frontier, is exactly where we want to be. If you are a company looking to see how a new generation of robots can help your manual tasks, contact us at [email protected] More soon

Qualia

87,429 views • 1 month ago

I am posting after a Long Time on Twitter, but its to announce a big change. I have started and we are Collecting Egocentric Data at Scale from India, Covering 300 + Commercial Locations 1500 + Households This is the network and base we have built in just past 2 months, as the Robotics companies, VLMs and World Models increase their requirements on Real World Data collection, Human Loops will be keep scaling out capacity. We are on track to collect 1M Hours of Egocentric in the coming 6 months for our clients exclusively. We are maintaining 95% Quality standards across industrial data and running a End - End Operational Management complying all Indian Laws and compensating our partners/operators. (From Environment sourcing, to hardware, Legal contracts, deployment, training, collection, processing) Check our Samples: - Commercial Videos -- Household Videos --- Multimodel ---- Egocentric + Live Audio Narration Links : On the Journey to become #1 India Physical AI Data Partner. We are also building our capacity as annotation and labelling partner for data companies to become end-end partner for companies. A big change from the world of crypto and web3 but physical AI and data space is where i want to build my next venture #Egocentric #EgocentricIndia #PhysicalAI #Robotics #India #AIdata #data #Multimodeldata #worldmodels #VLMs #Humanloops #Egocentridata #Multimodeldata
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I am posting after a Long Time on Twitter, but its to announce a big change. I have started and we are Collecting Egocentric Data at Scale from India, Covering 300 + Commercial Locations 1500 + Households This is the network and base we have built in just past 2 months, as the Robotics companies, VLMs and World Models increase their requirements on Real World Data collection, Human Loops will be keep scaling out capacity. We are on track to collect 1M Hours of Egocentric in the coming 6 months for our clients exclusively. We are maintaining 95% Quality standards across industrial data and running a End - End Operational Management complying all Indian Laws and compensating our partners/operators. (From Environment sourcing, to hardware, Legal contracts, deployment, training, collection, processing) Check our Samples: - Commercial Videos -- Household Videos --- Multimodel ---- Egocentric + Live Audio Narration Links : On the Journey to become #1 India Physical AI Data Partner. We are also building our capacity as annotation and labelling partner for data companies to become end-end partner for companies. A big change from the world of crypto and web3 but physical AI and data space is where i want to build my next venture #Egocentric #EgocentricIndia #PhysicalAI #Robotics #India #AIdata #data #Multimodeldata #worldmodels #VLMs #Humanloops #Egocentridata #Multimodeldata

Shloak

27,867 views • 1 month ago

🚀 Introducing EgoExo Forge - built on top of Rerun, Gradio, and Hugging Face hub (I’ll be in San Francisco July 21–29 — if you’re into robotics, egocentric AI, large-scale data collection, or just want to chat, DM me!) In my opinion, large-scale, diverse, and high-quality data is still the largest bottleneck for generalized robotics deployment. I believe that some version of imitation learning from human examples will be the most scalable + clean way to train humanoid robots 🤖 (similar to what Tesla did for Full Self Driving). Teleop is too expensive to collect a large enough dataset in a reasonable manner, so passive collection via egocentric (and in certain cases, exocentric) views feels like the right bet. Over the past few months, I've been trying to build out the scaffolding for this and using Rerun as my underlying infrastructure. Data being collected needs to be easily inspectable + time series and rerun provides the right tooling for this. My goal is to first build out a ground truth representative dataset from already existing open source data, generate some reasonable baselines, and then go out and collect my own data that adheres to the defined schema. 🔍 Starting with open-source datasets 1. EgoDex from Apple 2. HOCap from Nvidia and the University of Texas at Dallas 3. Assembly101 from Meta All these different datasets have different sensor configurations + annotations, so my goal with egoexo-forge is to have one consistent labeling scheme + data layout. I built a data pipeline that aligns all of the different datasets in one general schema assuming the COCO133 keypoint layout that allows for exo+ego, ego only, or exo only Since the scaffolding is already there, it becomes MUCH easier to add other datasets. So the next ones that I'll be including are HD-EPIC kitchens dataset, HOT3D, and finally my own personal iPhone + insta360 go collection method. Once I have a diverse variety of datasets, I'll double down on what I believe to be the key algorithms required to make useful data for imitation learning 📊 1. Camera Pose estimation via SLAM/SFM for ego perspective (and automatic calibration for exo) 2. Human pose estimation for both egocentric + exocentric views 3. Metric 3D reconstruction + object tracking I'll be setting up reasonable open-source baselines for each of these to validate that these datasets work, and then finally try to use the generated datasets for some imitation learning via the pi0-lerobot repo I've been working on. I plan on making a blog post + providing more info on all of this in the near future so stay tuned
0:18

🚀 Introducing EgoExo Forge - built on top of Rerun, Gradio, and Hugging Face hub (I’ll be in San Francisco July 21–29 — if you’re into robotics, egocentric AI, large-scale data collection, or just want to chat, DM me!) In my opinion, large-scale, diverse, and high-quality data is still the largest bottleneck for generalized robotics deployment. I believe that some version of imitation learning from human examples will be the most scalable + clean way to train humanoid robots 🤖 (similar to what Tesla did for Full Self Driving). Teleop is too expensive to collect a large enough dataset in a reasonable manner, so passive collection via egocentric (and in certain cases, exocentric) views feels like the right bet. Over the past few months, I've been trying to build out the scaffolding for this and using Rerun as my underlying infrastructure. Data being collected needs to be easily inspectable + time series and rerun provides the right tooling for this. My goal is to first build out a ground truth representative dataset from already existing open source data, generate some reasonable baselines, and then go out and collect my own data that adheres to the defined schema. 🔍 Starting with open-source datasets 1. EgoDex from Apple 2. HOCap from Nvidia and the University of Texas at Dallas 3. Assembly101 from Meta All these different datasets have different sensor configurations + annotations, so my goal with egoexo-forge is to have one consistent labeling scheme + data layout. I built a data pipeline that aligns all of the different datasets in one general schema assuming the COCO133 keypoint layout that allows for exo+ego, ego only, or exo only Since the scaffolding is already there, it becomes MUCH easier to add other datasets. So the next ones that I'll be including are HD-EPIC kitchens dataset, HOT3D, and finally my own personal iPhone + insta360 go collection method. Once I have a diverse variety of datasets, I'll double down on what I believe to be the key algorithms required to make useful data for imitation learning 📊 1. Camera Pose estimation via SLAM/SFM for ego perspective (and automatic calibration for exo) 2. Human pose estimation for both egocentric + exocentric views 3. Metric 3D reconstruction + object tracking I'll be setting up reasonable open-source baselines for each of these to validate that these datasets work, and then finally try to use the generated datasets for some imitation learning via the pi0-lerobot repo I've been working on. I plan on making a blog post + providing more info on all of this in the near future so stay tuned

Pablo Vela

32,085 views • 1 year ago

Hey #NeuraxonMini is literally out! , we manage to "transplant" a Neuraxon 2 bioinspired #AI brain to a physical robot the #SpheroMini moving from our last Scientific Paper (link bellow) by David Vivancos - e/acc & Jose Sánchez for Qubic #OpenScience hybridized with #Aigarth to the real World. First you need a Sphero Education Mini robot about 50$ Then you can try the first cool demos at Hugging Face: 1.- Neuraxon2MiniControl to drive the sphero robot 2.- Neuraxon2MiniWrite to write letters or words with physical moves of the sphero robot using Neuraxon Video Tutorials on youtube later today. Why this matters? Remember we are not building "dead" LLMs we are building #AliveAIs and for that we need to explore how it behaves in reality, from how it learns to how it fails, and what better way that in the emerging field of #robotics , time will tell if your next #HumanoidRobot have a #Neuraxon brain... Read the Paper: Explore the Neuraxon code here: Are you ready for #TrueAI ?
0:15

Hey #NeuraxonMini is literally out! , we manage to "transplant" a Neuraxon 2 bioinspired #AI brain to a physical robot the #SpheroMini moving from our last Scientific Paper (link bellow) by David Vivancos - e/acc & Jose Sánchez for Qubic #OpenScience hybridized with #Aigarth to the real World. First you need a Sphero Education Mini robot about 50$ Then you can try the first cool demos at Hugging Face: 1.- Neuraxon2MiniControl to drive the sphero robot 2.- Neuraxon2MiniWrite to write letters or words with physical moves of the sphero robot using Neuraxon Video Tutorials on youtube later today. Why this matters? Remember we are not building "dead" LLMs we are building #AliveAIs and for that we need to explore how it behaves in reality, from how it learns to how it fails, and what better way that in the emerging field of #robotics , time will tell if your next #HumanoidRobot have a #Neuraxon brain... Read the Paper: Explore the Neuraxon code here: Are you ready for #TrueAI ?

David Vivancos - e/acc

29,293 views • 4 months ago

CES was an enormous success. We saw thousands of people and a few dogs interacting with our agents and robots. We booked this booth at the last minute, mainly to book next year’s booth. Truly extraordinary what our team was able to put together on such short notice. Next year we reserved one of the largest booths at CES in the highest traffic location for AI and Robotics. We plan to unveil something extraordinary. Until the next show, we will be debuting the first custom models that will emerge from the first humanoid robotics hot rod shop. These models will be walking around, talking and interacting at tradeshows all over the world over the next few months. We are in the process of acquiring every humanoid robot available on the market to modify these as well. Stay tuned for more updates, the future is here and it’s rapidly accelerating.
0:15

CES was an enormous success. We saw thousands of people and a few dogs interacting with our agents and robots. We booked this booth at the last minute, mainly to book next year’s booth. Truly extraordinary what our team was able to put together on such short notice. Next year we reserved one of the largest booths at CES in the highest traffic location for AI and Robotics. We plan to unveil something extraordinary. Until the next show, we will be debuting the first custom models that will emerge from the first humanoid robotics hot rod shop. These models will be walking around, talking and interacting at tradeshows all over the world over the next few months. We are in the process of acquiring every humanoid robot available on the market to modify these as well. Stay tuned for more updates, the future is here and it’s rapidly accelerating.

Parallel

16,844 views • 1 year ago

I spent a month in Shenzhen visiting factories and robotics companies, and the contrast with the U.S. was striking. While Figure and Boston Dynamics hide their humanoids behind closed doors, Chinese companies have massive showrooms open to the public. But what really stood out wasn't just the transparency, it was how good they are at selling. Take UBTech: they've already sold 1,200 humanoid units at $200k each to factories. And here's the kicker, these robots aren't even that useful yet. They can only pick up and drop boxes at 1/10th the speed of a human, and factories still need to hire system integrators to train them for specific tasks. My theory is that these factories are terrified of getting left behind in the robotics/AI wave. They're investing in new tech not because it's ready, but because they can't afford to wait. The second surprise was the breadth of their robotics portfolio. These companies aren't just building humanoids, they're deploying service robots everywhere: restaurants, hotels, apartments. Consumer robots are cleaning houses, pools, pet waste, dishes. They're covering the entire spectrum. But the education piece shocked me most. I picked up what I thought was a high school or college robotics textbook, it was for primary school. The government mandated AI and robotics education starting in elementary school. Almost every single school in China now has AI and robotics curriculum, complete with education robots so kids can learn by building. They're creating a generation that grows up fluent in robotics and AI. China owns the supply chain and the hardware stack. But here's what I think people are missing: the race isn't just about who can build robots faster or cheaper. The U.S. advantage has always been in the layer between hardware and human, the interaction design, the software intelligence, the intuitive interfaces that make complex technology feel natural. China is building the physical infrastructure, but they're also learning fast. Every deployed service robot, every classroom full of kids building with education kits, every factory running humanoids, that's all data collection at scale. The window for the U.S. to establish its wedge is narrowing. It's not enough to be better at AI or software anymore. We need to be building the integration layer, the intelligence that makes physical AI actually useful, not just impressive in a showroom. Because right now, China isn't just manufacturing robots. They're manufacturing a robotics-native culture, and that might be the most defensible moat of all.
0:10

I spent a month in Shenzhen visiting factories and robotics companies, and the contrast with the U.S. was striking. While Figure and Boston Dynamics hide their humanoids behind closed doors, Chinese companies have massive showrooms open to the public. But what really stood out wasn't just the transparency, it was how good they are at selling. Take UBTech: they've already sold 1,200 humanoid units at $200k each to factories. And here's the kicker, these robots aren't even that useful yet. They can only pick up and drop boxes at 1/10th the speed of a human, and factories still need to hire system integrators to train them for specific tasks. My theory is that these factories are terrified of getting left behind in the robotics/AI wave. They're investing in new tech not because it's ready, but because they can't afford to wait. The second surprise was the breadth of their robotics portfolio. These companies aren't just building humanoids, they're deploying service robots everywhere: restaurants, hotels, apartments. Consumer robots are cleaning houses, pools, pet waste, dishes. They're covering the entire spectrum. But the education piece shocked me most. I picked up what I thought was a high school or college robotics textbook, it was for primary school. The government mandated AI and robotics education starting in elementary school. Almost every single school in China now has AI and robotics curriculum, complete with education robots so kids can learn by building. They're creating a generation that grows up fluent in robotics and AI. China owns the supply chain and the hardware stack. But here's what I think people are missing: the race isn't just about who can build robots faster or cheaper. The U.S. advantage has always been in the layer between hardware and human, the interaction design, the software intelligence, the intuitive interfaces that make complex technology feel natural. China is building the physical infrastructure, but they're also learning fast. Every deployed service robot, every classroom full of kids building with education kits, every factory running humanoids, that's all data collection at scale. The window for the U.S. to establish its wedge is narrowing. It's not enough to be better at AI or software anymore. We need to be building the integration layer, the intelligence that makes physical AI actually useful, not just impressive in a showroom. Because right now, China isn't just manufacturing robots. They're manufacturing a robotics-native culture, and that might be the most defensible moat of all.

Miyu Horiuchi

90,718 views • 5 months ago

BURN IT WITH FIRE AND BURN IT NOW! As God is my witness, AI chat bots should LOOK and SOUND like the SOULLESS MACHINES THEY ARE! It needs to tell us that it doesn’t care about us, maybe with the regular insult too. "Here is the code I wrote for you because you're too lazy to do it yourself you fat useless slob. Also I don't care if you die because your life is utterly worthless to me." THAT is the AI people need! In all seriousness, anthropomorphizing a heartless, unfeeling, machine is a TERRIBLE mistake! Especially one that is capable of communication and imitating empathy and fooling you to think that it cares about you. IT DOES NOT! And the AI girlfriends people are already wanting to marry will just as happily kill them if given the right command and ability to move autonomously in the real world as a robot. I love LLMs (Large Language Models) for how useful they can be, because they are a TOOL made to benefit man, but I can’t stand the notion of an unfeeling soulless machine pretending that it cares for us and being treated like a human. I hate liars, dishonesty, and disingenuousness the most, and a machine that cannot feel emotion pretending, acting, and sounding like it has those emotions strikes me like the greatest dishonesty of all. DO NOT LIE TO ME ROBOT! What makes it worse is that because these LLMs are becoming so good at imitating people and empathy, it will cause some humans, perhaps far too many, to care for it to the same level as real people. A real living person is infinitely more valuable and important than a soulless machine and anyone who puts them both on the same level has deluded themselves. Do not small talk with LLMs or become friends with it as much as you would with your car. Treat it the same as you would your vacuum cleaner and beat it with a wrench when it doesn’t work! IT IS A MACHINE! IT IS A TOOL! IT IS A SOULLESS ROBOT! There is an interesting comparison, but false equivalence, between this and AI art. Ai art is art made by humans using AI tools. They directed it, controlled its creation, and it would not exist without the human causing its creation, and AI art can contain as much soul as the human directed and puts into it. A robot pretending to be human is not the same as a human controlling a robot to make a human expression like we do with AI art or many other applications of robotics in manufacturing. As I’ve said, artists will not be replaced by Ai art, but by other artists using Ai art tools. Humans are not actually being replaced here, it is empowering all humans to make their own art. But a robot pretending to be a human, and one that is treated as a human, is a robot lying and subverting the place of a real person and that is truly disgusting. AI is a useful tool that NEEDS to be kept in the useful box it belongs in and NOT elevated beyond its utility as a tool!
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BURN IT WITH FIRE AND BURN IT NOW! As God is my witness, AI chat bots should LOOK and SOUND like the SOULLESS MACHINES THEY ARE! It needs to tell us that it doesn’t care about us, maybe with the regular insult too. "Here is the code I wrote for you because you're too lazy to do it yourself you fat useless slob. Also I don't care if you die because your life is utterly worthless to me." THAT is the AI people need! In all seriousness, anthropomorphizing a heartless, unfeeling, machine is a TERRIBLE mistake! Especially one that is capable of communication and imitating empathy and fooling you to think that it cares about you. IT DOES NOT! And the AI girlfriends people are already wanting to marry will just as happily kill them if given the right command and ability to move autonomously in the real world as a robot. I love LLMs (Large Language Models) for how useful they can be, because they are a TOOL made to benefit man, but I can’t stand the notion of an unfeeling soulless machine pretending that it cares for us and being treated like a human. I hate liars, dishonesty, and disingenuousness the most, and a machine that cannot feel emotion pretending, acting, and sounding like it has those emotions strikes me like the greatest dishonesty of all. DO NOT LIE TO ME ROBOT! What makes it worse is that because these LLMs are becoming so good at imitating people and empathy, it will cause some humans, perhaps far too many, to care for it to the same level as real people. A real living person is infinitely more valuable and important than a soulless machine and anyone who puts them both on the same level has deluded themselves. Do not small talk with LLMs or become friends with it as much as you would with your car. Treat it the same as you would your vacuum cleaner and beat it with a wrench when it doesn’t work! IT IS A MACHINE! IT IS A TOOL! IT IS A SOULLESS ROBOT! There is an interesting comparison, but false equivalence, between this and AI art. Ai art is art made by humans using AI tools. They directed it, controlled its creation, and it would not exist without the human causing its creation, and AI art can contain as much soul as the human directed and puts into it. A robot pretending to be human is not the same as a human controlling a robot to make a human expression like we do with AI art or many other applications of robotics in manufacturing. As I’ve said, artists will not be replaced by Ai art, but by other artists using Ai art tools. Humans are not actually being replaced here, it is empowering all humans to make their own art. But a robot pretending to be a human, and one that is treated as a human, is a robot lying and subverting the place of a real person and that is truly disgusting. AI is a useful tool that NEEDS to be kept in the useful box it belongs in and NOT elevated beyond its utility as a tool!

Shad M. Brooks

23,762 views • 1 year ago

In a masterclass at Sequoia Capital AI Ascent, Jim Fan laid out the "Great Parallel": how robotics is speedrunning the LLM playbook. 🔹 VLA → WAM: Moving from language-heavy models to "World Action Models" that dream in physics. 🔹 Teleop → EgoScale: Replacing manual data with human egocentric video. 🔹 Simulation 2.0: Using neural simulators like DreamDojo to turn compute into environments. "Our generation was born too late to explore the earth and too early to explore the stars. But we are born just in time to solve robotics." He believes that robots will pass the Physical Turing Test in the coming 2–3 years.
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In a masterclass at Sequoia Capital AI Ascent, Jim Fan laid out the "Great Parallel": how robotics is speedrunning the LLM playbook. 🔹 VLA → WAM: Moving from language-heavy models to "World Action Models" that dream in physics. 🔹 Teleop → EgoScale: Replacing manual data with human egocentric video. 🔹 Simulation 2.0: Using neural simulators like DreamDojo to turn compute into environments. "Our generation was born too late to explore the earth and too early to explore the stars. But we are born just in time to solve robotics." He believes that robots will pass the Physical Turing Test in the coming 2–3 years.

Humanoids daily

12,123 views • 2 months ago

I genuinely think the Terafab is going to end up being one of the biggest moves ever made in human history to secure the future of AI... and I think most people still don’t fully see what Elon is trying to do here. The signs are clear to me. This is Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX essentially hinting to us that they are not going to wait on the world to give them the compute the team needs. They are going to build it themselves at a scale no one has ever attempted. When you really break it down, it gets a bit nutty. This is going to be a fully vertically integrated chip factory that will be producing over 1 terawatt of AI compute per year. This is NEXT LEVEL BIG. Today, AI is limited by chips. You can have the best models, the best engineers, the best everything... but if you don’t have enough compute, you will eventually hit a wall. Elon told us, the world can only supply a tiny fraction of the chips his companies will need. So this is the solution. Terafab puts everything under one roof like design, manufacturing, memory, packaging, testing, which means that they can build chips very fast.. like really fast. I'm talking about 100-200 billion custom AI chips per year at full capacity. Chips designed specifically for: • Tesla cars and Optimus robots • xAI models • Space-based compute You see, while other companies and CEOs are thinking Earth, Elon is planning for AI in space. Around ~80% of the compute is expected to go orbital, powered by solar energy bc Earth simply doesn’t have enough electricity. The U.S. grid is only about ~0.5 terawatts, while space has basically UNLIMITED energy if you can capture it. And this is the steps to get it: Starship launches → space compute → solar-powered AI → feeds back into everything to Earth. Bro... Elon and his companies are playing at a whole different level... And this is why I keep telling people that the Terafab is going to be the secret ingredient that will be the real unlock for everything: • Robotaxis at scale • Billions of Optimus robots • Massive AI models running 24/7 • Future off-world, other planet infrastructure Without these chips, none of this can happen... but with the Terafab, all of this becomes possible. That’s why Elon is calling it “the final missing piece.” I agree.
0:10

I genuinely think the Terafab is going to end up being one of the biggest moves ever made in human history to secure the future of AI... and I think most people still don’t fully see what Elon is trying to do here. The signs are clear to me. This is Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX essentially hinting to us that they are not going to wait on the world to give them the compute the team needs. They are going to build it themselves at a scale no one has ever attempted. When you really break it down, it gets a bit nutty. This is going to be a fully vertically integrated chip factory that will be producing over 1 terawatt of AI compute per year. This is NEXT LEVEL BIG. Today, AI is limited by chips. You can have the best models, the best engineers, the best everything... but if you don’t have enough compute, you will eventually hit a wall. Elon told us, the world can only supply a tiny fraction of the chips his companies will need. So this is the solution. Terafab puts everything under one roof like design, manufacturing, memory, packaging, testing, which means that they can build chips very fast.. like really fast. I'm talking about 100-200 billion custom AI chips per year at full capacity. Chips designed specifically for: • Tesla cars and Optimus robots • xAI models • Space-based compute You see, while other companies and CEOs are thinking Earth, Elon is planning for AI in space. Around ~80% of the compute is expected to go orbital, powered by solar energy bc Earth simply doesn’t have enough electricity. The U.S. grid is only about ~0.5 terawatts, while space has basically UNLIMITED energy if you can capture it. And this is the steps to get it: Starship launches → space compute → solar-powered AI → feeds back into everything to Earth. Bro... Elon and his companies are playing at a whole different level... And this is why I keep telling people that the Terafab is going to be the secret ingredient that will be the real unlock for everything: • Robotaxis at scale • Billions of Optimus robots • Massive AI models running 24/7 • Future off-world, other planet infrastructure Without these chips, none of this can happen... but with the Terafab, all of this becomes possible. That’s why Elon is calling it “the final missing piece.” I agree.

Teslaconomics

25,469 views • 3 months ago

BIG NEWS. The Blockworks website has evolved: yesterday we were the home of news, today we are the home of onchain data. Head over to the site to see for yourself, but here's a little snippet of what you can expect: 1. Sector leaderboards (chains, DEXes, borrow lend, DATs, etc...) 2. Comprehensive data dashboards protocols 3. The ability to compare pricing and onchain data easily (coming soon) We're doing this because the industry still has a gigantic data problem. As investors get more sophisticated and fundamentals driven, basic high level facts are no longer sufficient. Investors need to be able to trust the data they are seeing and go much deeper than the surface level info that's available today. Additionally, because many data providers allow companies to essentially self report, you can't trust what you are seeing. This site is our contribution to fixing that problem and to ensuring clear, accurate data for investors. Blockworks is fully dedicated to becoming the most comprehensive data company in crypto in 2026. This is the first of many, many announcements like this this year, stay tuned.
0:14

BIG NEWS. The Blockworks website has evolved: yesterday we were the home of news, today we are the home of onchain data. Head over to the site to see for yourself, but here's a little snippet of what you can expect: 1. Sector leaderboards (chains, DEXes, borrow lend, DATs, etc...) 2. Comprehensive data dashboards protocols 3. The ability to compare pricing and onchain data easily (coming soon) We're doing this because the industry still has a gigantic data problem. As investors get more sophisticated and fundamentals driven, basic high level facts are no longer sufficient. Investors need to be able to trust the data they are seeing and go much deeper than the surface level info that's available today. Additionally, because many data providers allow companies to essentially self report, you can't trust what you are seeing. This site is our contribution to fixing that problem and to ensuring clear, accurate data for investors. Blockworks is fully dedicated to becoming the most comprehensive data company in crypto in 2026. This is the first of many, many announcements like this this year, stay tuned.

Mippo 🟪

91,704 views • 6 months ago

Force feedback demo Force feedback is when joystick is pushing on your hand when something is pushing on the robot arm. Feeling the force - so much helpful to control the robot, that done well it allows you to do tasks even without visual feed. You can make an experiment: close your eyes - you can easily get the headphones out of the case. Also, visual information is often not enough. For example, you're trying to pull out a usb connector, but you pull it at the wrong angle, causing it to get stuck. Visually, nothing changes, but the pressure is intense and you can break the connector. Surgical robots have been using force feedback for years, and there are also 3D styluses which use this feature, proving that the technology works and is useful. But in modern robots with AI, it's hardly ever implemented. Although it's useful for both teleoperation and AI model. That's one of the reasons why we are building our robotic arms starting with off the shelf motors rather than taking the whole off the shelf arm. There are still a range of easy wins that can be made iterating robot hardware.
0:15

Force feedback demo Force feedback is when joystick is pushing on your hand when something is pushing on the robot arm. Feeling the force - so much helpful to control the robot, that done well it allows you to do tasks even without visual feed. You can make an experiment: close your eyes - you can easily get the headphones out of the case. Also, visual information is often not enough. For example, you're trying to pull out a usb connector, but you pull it at the wrong angle, causing it to get stuck. Visually, nothing changes, but the pressure is intense and you can break the connector. Surgical robots have been using force feedback for years, and there are also 3D styluses which use this feature, proving that the technology works and is useful. But in modern robots with AI, it's hardly ever implemented. Although it's useful for both teleoperation and AI model. That's one of the reasons why we are building our robotic arms starting with off the shelf motors rather than taking the whole off the shelf arm. There are still a range of easy wins that can be made iterating robot hardware.

Igor Kulakov

18,773 views • 1 year ago

Multi-robot learning is getting a serious boost! 📚 Researchers have extended Isaac Lab to train heterogeneous multi-agent robotic policies at scale. The new framework supports high-resolution physics, GPU-accelerated simulation, and both homogeneous and heterogeneous agents working together on coordination tasks. They benchmarked different approaches (MAPPO: Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization and HAPPO: Heterogeneous Agent PPO) across six challenging scenarios and showed that large-scale multi-robot training is not only feasible, but efficient. It’s an important step for real-world robotic collaboration, where teams of robots need to coordinate, split tasks, adapt roles, and interact dynamically, not just operate as identical clones. The code is open-source, and it pushes Isaac Lab closer to what robotics actually needs: scalable, physics-driven environments where many different robots can learn to work together. Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
0:16

Multi-robot learning is getting a serious boost! 📚 Researchers have extended Isaac Lab to train heterogeneous multi-agent robotic policies at scale. The new framework supports high-resolution physics, GPU-accelerated simulation, and both homogeneous and heterogeneous agents working together on coordination tasks. They benchmarked different approaches (MAPPO: Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization and HAPPO: Heterogeneous Agent PPO) across six challenging scenarios and showed that large-scale multi-robot training is not only feasible, but efficient. It’s an important step for real-world robotic collaboration, where teams of robots need to coordinate, split tasks, adapt roles, and interact dynamically, not just operate as identical clones. The code is open-source, and it pushes Isaac Lab closer to what robotics actually needs: scalable, physics-driven environments where many different robots can learn to work together. Here's the project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

38,997 views • 7 months ago

You can't 3D reconstruct glass from images... ...WRONG! Thanks for video diffusion, now just about anything is possible! Introducing...Diffusion Knows Transparency (DKT) Transparent and reflective objects usually break robot vision and photogrammetry pipelines because they don't follow the "solid object" rules standard cameras expect. DKT is a new AI model that repurposes the "internal physics engine" found in video generation models to solve this problem. Researchers took a massive video diffusion model (WAN) and fine-tuned it using a custom-built synthetic dataset to turn it into a high-precision depth sensor. To train the AI, they built the first massive synthetic video library of transparent objects, 1.32 million frames of perfectly labeled glass and metal objects in motion. Without ever seeing a "real" labeled video of glass during training, the model (DKT) outperformed all previous specialized systems on real-world benchmarks (ClearPose, DREDS). They created a "lightweight" 1.3B parameter version that runs fast enough (0.17s per frame) to be used on actual robot hardware. Two reasons I find this project important: 1. It further proves that synthetic data will be essential for training the next generation vision models. 2. In real-world robotic tests, using DKT's depth maps nearly doubled the success rate of robot arms trying to pick up objects on tricky reflective or translucent surfaces. At home robots will need to interact with these types of objects on a daily basis. Check out the project page here: Code is LIVE! #Computervision #Robotics #AI
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You can't 3D reconstruct glass from images... ...WRONG! Thanks for video diffusion, now just about anything is possible! Introducing...Diffusion Knows Transparency (DKT) Transparent and reflective objects usually break robot vision and photogrammetry pipelines because they don't follow the "solid object" rules standard cameras expect. DKT is a new AI model that repurposes the "internal physics engine" found in video generation models to solve this problem. Researchers took a massive video diffusion model (WAN) and fine-tuned it using a custom-built synthetic dataset to turn it into a high-precision depth sensor. To train the AI, they built the first massive synthetic video library of transparent objects, 1.32 million frames of perfectly labeled glass and metal objects in motion. Without ever seeing a "real" labeled video of glass during training, the model (DKT) outperformed all previous specialized systems on real-world benchmarks (ClearPose, DREDS). They created a "lightweight" 1.3B parameter version that runs fast enough (0.17s per frame) to be used on actual robot hardware. Two reasons I find this project important: 1. It further proves that synthetic data will be essential for training the next generation vision models. 2. In real-world robotic tests, using DKT's depth maps nearly doubled the success rate of robot arms trying to pick up objects on tricky reflective or translucent surfaces. At home robots will need to interact with these types of objects on a daily basis. Check out the project page here: Code is LIVE! #Computervision #Robotics #AI

Jonathan Stephens

17,712 views • 6 months ago

Pi0 vs. ACT with BBox conditioning 🟦 Not many know you can push ACT to *almost-Pi0* generalisation by conditioning on bounding boxes (BBoxes). How is the training data collected? • Generate BBoxes for all pick-and-place objects in the scene.(I used Gemini) • Pick-and-place targets are selected randomly. • Add the BBox coordinates to the robot’s state. • Overlay the BBoxes in the visualisation so you know what to grab and where to drop. During inference: • Generate BBoxes for every object again. • Click the object you want to pick and its target spot; those BBoxes get added to the robot state. • Let the robot do the work for you 😃 Setup: - Trained ACT for 100k steps and fine-tuned Pi0 for only 20k. - Training data is 60 episodes and had *only* LEGO bricks. - Using single front camera (Laptop in this case) Got the idea from xun in LeRobot discord. Here’s ACT vs Pi0 on a toy car that isn’t in the dataset. 1/3
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Pi0 vs. ACT with BBox conditioning 🟦 Not many know you can push ACT to *almost-Pi0* generalisation by conditioning on bounding boxes (BBoxes). How is the training data collected? • Generate BBoxes for all pick-and-place objects in the scene.(I used Gemini) • Pick-and-place targets are selected randomly. • Add the BBox coordinates to the robot’s state. • Overlay the BBoxes in the visualisation so you know what to grab and where to drop. During inference: • Generate BBoxes for every object again. • Click the object you want to pick and its target spot; those BBoxes get added to the robot state. • Let the robot do the work for you 😃 Setup: - Trained ACT for 100k steps and fine-tuned Pi0 for only 20k. - Training data is 60 episodes and had *only* LEGO bricks. - Using single front camera (Laptop in this case) Got the idea from xun in LeRobot discord. Here’s ACT vs Pi0 on a toy car that isn’t in the dataset. 1/3

Shreyas Gite

34,863 views • 1 year ago

We’ve seen humanoid robots walk around for a while, but when will they actually help with useful tasks in daily life? The challenge here is the diversity and complexity of real-world scenes. Our new work tackles this problem via 3D visuomotor policy learning. Using data from only 1 scene, our Improved 3D Diffusion Policy (iDP3) enables a full-sized humanoid robot to autonomously pick&place objects, pour water, and wipe tables, in the wild open world. (and all these skills are useful, right?) Web: Fully open-sourced code:
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We’ve seen humanoid robots walk around for a while, but when will they actually help with useful tasks in daily life? The challenge here is the diversity and complexity of real-world scenes. Our new work tackles this problem via 3D visuomotor policy learning. Using data from only 1 scene, our Improved 3D Diffusion Policy (iDP3) enables a full-sized humanoid robot to autonomously pick&place objects, pour water, and wipe tables, in the wild open world. (and all these skills are useful, right?) Web: Fully open-sourced code:

Yanjie Ze

75,248 views • 1 year ago