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What if we're approaching robotic manipulation all wrong? Ilya Sutskever makes a fascinating point here: Current approaches throw massive amounts of data at the problem — millions of simulation steps, huge compute. And still, robots can't match human dexterity. Real-world learning of new skills? "Very out of reach." Meanwhile,... humans pick up manipulation tasks almost instantly. Our dexterity is unmatched. And we do it with remarkable robustness — no reward shaping, no curriculum design, no training instability. Why the gap? Evolution. 500M years of optimisation for locomotion, vision, and manipulation. For these ancient sensorimotor tasks, maybe brute-force data isn't the answer. Maybe we should be copying the biological algorithms that already solved it. CC: Dwarkesh Patelshow more

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31,262 views • 7 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Unitree founder Wang Xingxing: In robotics, locomotion and basic motion is mostly solved. But grasping and manipulation—anything related to haptics—hasn’t been solved. That’s the key bottleneck preventing them from being deployed at scale in factories and homes. He says that simulation is much faster for training but for manipulation tasks you still need real-world training data—for now.

Unitree founder Wang Xingxing: In robotics, locomotion and basic motion is mostly solved. But grasping and manipulation—anything related to haptics—hasn’t been solved. That’s the key bottleneck preventing them from being deployed at scale in factories and homes. He says that simulation is much faster for training but for manipulation tasks you still need real-world training data—for now.

Kyle Chan

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2026 is the year of robots: Atlas's hands mimic human dexterity with adaptable grips for various tasks. Tactile sensors enable fine-grain manipulation. Atlas is a step toward the future.

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Chubby♨️

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How to use simulation data for real-world robot manipulation? We present sim-and-real co-training, a simple recipe for manipulation. We demonstrate that sim data can significantly enhance real-world performance, even with notable differences between the sim and the real. (1/n)

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Real-world robot data is expensive and slow to collect, creating a major challenge for humanoid development. 🤖 The NVIDIA GR00T N1.6 open vision language action model is pre-trained on a diverse mix of data, including thousands of hours of Stanford Vision and Learning Lab’s BEHAVIOR simulation data, which covers long-horizon everyday manipulation tasks. This diverse training is the key to robust cross-embodiment performance and real-world adaptability. 🌍 Read the blog 🔗

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13,421 views • 5 months ago

$Ilya Sutskever: We shouldn't just align AI to humans. We should align it to sentient life. That may even be easier, because a sentient AI will empathize with other sentient beings. Dwarkesh Patel: But then humans become a tiny fraction of future sentience. Do we lose control? Ilya Sutskever: It's true. But maybe the answer is to cap the power of the strongest superintelligence.$

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53,924 views • 7 months ago

A big part of scaling robot learning to solve real-world problems is that we somehow need to get enough diverse, high-quality data to train our robots to perform useful things. GPT and its fellow large language models were bootstrapped and proved out on a massive dataset of real-world language data. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, similarly massive datasets don’t really exist for robotics — so, in our unending pursuit of high-quality, useful data, we turn to simulation. I compared a couple recent works on sim-to-real robot manipulation, which discuss how to train perception-driven manipulation policies in simulation, in such a way that they’re useful in the real world. - DextraH-RGB, from NVIDIA - Sim-and-Real Co-Training: A Simple Recipe for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation, also from NVIDIA — specifically the GEAR lab - Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Dexterous Manipulation on Humanoids, another GEAR lab paper - Local Policies Enable Zero-shot Long-Horizon Manipulation, from CMU (video from DextrAH-RGB)

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Chris Paxton

20,486 views • 1 year ago

State-of-the-art robot policies often need hundreds of hours of data. What if we needed none? Introducing TiPToP: a manipulation system that zero-shots open-world tasks from pixels and language using vision foundation models and GPU-parallelized Task and Motion Planning (TAMP).

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Nishanth Kumar

77,488 views • 3 months ago

🚨 Jensen Huang says everyone panicked about the AI data when MOST training data was never REAL to begin with. Ilya Sutskever told the industry pre-training was over. "Ilya said, 'We're out of data,' or something like that. 'Pre-training is over,' or something like that," Huang says. "The industry panicked, you know, that this is the end of AI." "And of course, of course that's obviously not true. We're gonna keep on scaling the amount of data that we have to train with." "A lot of that data is probably gonna be synthetic." That's where the panic came from — synthetic data sounds like cheating. "Most of the data that we are training, that we teach each other with, inform each other with, is synthetic." "It's synthetic because it didn't come out of nature." "You created it. I'm consuming it. I modify it, augment it, I regenerate it, somebody else consumes it." The textbook in your hand is synthetic. The post you're reading is synthetic. The lecture you took is synthetic. Nature didn't make any of it. Humans did. AI just learned to do the same thing — faster. "Training is now limited by compute," Huang says. "Data is now limited by compute." The data wall wasn't a wall. It was a mirror. If you're new here, follow @AiEvolutio for the latest on ChatGPT, Claude, and the AI tools shaping how we work and create. — Jensen Huang ( NVIDIA ), NVIDIA CEO, on Lex Fridman's ( Lex Fridman ) podcast

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AI Evolution

15,565 views • 29 days ago

Sanctuary AI announced the integration of new tactile sensors into its Phoenix humanoid robot, enhancing its dexterity for fine manipulation. The combination of touch and haptic servoing provides richer data, enabling blind picking, slippage detection, and better force control.

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The Humanoid Hub

51,910 views • 1 year ago

Teaching robots real dexterity has always been a challenge. But what if they could handle tools like a human? DexterityGen (DexGen) is a new system that helps robots use their hands better. It improves how they grip, move, and handle objects… from holding a pen to using a screwdriver. DexGen learns in simulation and refines its skills in the real world, making robotic hands much more useful. What makes DexGen special? ✅ Smarter movements that refine rough actions into precise skills ✅ Trained on a massive collection of dexterous tasks for better learning ✅ Better teleoperation that makes robotic hand control easier and safer ✅ Handles real-world challenges like small objects, tricky angles, and gravity This moves robots closer to real dexterity. It makes tool use more natural, improves stability, and brings robotic hands one step closer to human-level skill. Seen at Zhao-Heng Yin 🫶 Github: Paper:

Teaching robots real dexterity has always been a challenge. But what if they could handle tools like a human? DexterityGen (DexGen) is a new system that helps robots use their hands better. It improves how they grip, move, and handle objects… from holding a pen to using a screwdriver. DexGen learns in simulation and refines its skills in the real world, making robotic hands much more useful. What makes DexGen special? ✅ Smarter movements that refine rough actions into precise skills ✅ Trained on a massive collection of dexterous tasks for better learning ✅ Better teleoperation that makes robotic hand control easier and safer ✅ Handles real-world challenges like small objects, tricky angles, and gravity This moves robots closer to real dexterity. It makes tool use more natural, improves stability, and brings robotic hands one step closer to human-level skill. Seen at Zhao-Heng Yin 🫶 Github: Paper:

Ilir Aliu

51,490 views • 1 year ago

Robot trained entirely in simulation! 🤯 Sudo AI just released #sudo R1. This could be the moment the data bottleneck in robotics finally breaks, a major step forward for getting simulation-trained robots to actually work in the real world. #sudo R1 is a manipulation foundation model that reliably picks objects it has never seen: glass, fabric, metal, irregular shapes. All with zero real-world training data. No tele-op. No demos. No manual labeling. Pure simulation. And picking isn't just any skill, it's the foundation. Almost everything we want robots to do starts with being able to reliably pick something up. Data collection is the bottleneck holding the whole field back. Every new task means hours of tele-op and armies of labelers. If simulation alone can actually deliver production-grade picking, that bottleneck starts to disappear. Really exciting to see! If the results hold, the path to general-purpose robots just got a whole lot shorter. 👇 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Robot trained entirely in simulation! 🤯 Sudo AI just released #sudo R1. This could be the moment the data bottleneck in robotics finally breaks, a major step forward for getting simulation-trained robots to actually work in the real world. #sudo R1 is a manipulation foundation model that reliably picks objects it has never seen: glass, fabric, metal, irregular shapes. All with zero real-world training data. No tele-op. No demos. No manual labeling. Pure simulation. And picking isn't just any skill, it's the foundation. Almost everything we want robots to do starts with being able to reliably pick something up. Data collection is the bottleneck holding the whole field back. Every new task means hours of tele-op and armies of labelers. If simulation alone can actually deliver production-grade picking, that bottleneck starts to disappear. Really exciting to see! If the results hold, the path to general-purpose robots just got a whole lot shorter. 👇 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

25,718 views • 2 months 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

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

185,867 views • 2 months ago

Today, we publicly released RoboCasa365, a large-scale simulation benchmark for training and systematically evaluating generalist robot models. Built upon our original RoboCasa framework, it offers: • 2,500 realistic kitchen environments; • 365 everyday tasks (basic skills + long-horizon mobile manipulation); • Over 3,200 objects with many articulated fixtures/appliances. All are designed for fully controlled, reproducible benchmarking of robotic policies. Progress in robotic foundation models is real. But it’s still hard to answer basic questions like: How close are we to general-purpose autonomy? What factors drive generalization? What are the model/data scaling curves like? Real-world eval is slow and noisy, and existing sims (like LIBERO, which we built 3 years ago) often lack sufficient task and scene diversity. This benchmark comes with 2,200+ hours of demonstrations and 500K+ trajectories to support studies of multi-task training, pretraining, and continual learning at scale. Check it out at

Today, we publicly released RoboCasa365, a large-scale simulation benchmark for training and systematically evaluating generalist robot models. Built upon our original RoboCasa framework, it offers: • 2,500 realistic kitchen environments; • 365 everyday tasks (basic skills + long-horizon mobile manipulation); • Over 3,200 objects with many articulated fixtures/appliances. All are designed for fully controlled, reproducible benchmarking of robotic policies. Progress in robotic foundation models is real. But it’s still hard to answer basic questions like: How close are we to general-purpose autonomy? What factors drive generalization? What are the model/data scaling curves like? Real-world eval is slow and noisy, and existing sims (like LIBERO, which we built 3 years ago) often lack sufficient task and scene diversity. This benchmark comes with 2,200+ hours of demonstrations and 500K+ trajectories to support studies of multi-task training, pretraining, and continual learning at scale. Check it out at

Yuke Zhu

23,755 views • 3 months ago

Elon just dropped a MAJOR nugget on how Tesla is going to be training Optimus to do real world tasks. They are building an Optimus Academy, which is a large scale, dedicated real-world training facility to accelerate the development of Optimus. The Academy will deploy thousands of Optimus units, potentially 10,000 to 30,000 robots, in a controlled realistic environment where they perform self-play, experiment with tasks, iterate on behaviors, and continuously generate training data through trial and error. The Tesla bots will also run millions of simulations in Tesla’s high-fidelity physics-accurate engine, allowing Optimus to close the “sim-to-real gap” by using these real-world observations to refine and validate the simulations! “You’re actually highlighting an important limitation and difference from cars. We’ll soon have 10 million cars on the road. It’s hard to duplicate that massive training flywheel. For the robot, what we’re going to need to do is build a lot of robots and put them in kind of an Optimus Academy so they can do self-play in reality. We’re actually building that out. We can have at least 10,000 Optimus robots, maybe 20-30,000, that are doing self-play and testing different tasks. Tesla has quite a good reality generator, a physics-accurate reality generator, that we made for the cars. We’ll do the same thing for the robots. We actually have done that for the robots. So you have a few tens of thousands of humanoid robots doing different tasks. You can do millions of simulated robots in the simulated world. You use the tens of thousands of robots in the real world to close the simulation to reality gap. Close the sim-to-real gap.”

Elon just dropped a MAJOR nugget on how Tesla is going to be training Optimus to do real world tasks. They are building an Optimus Academy, which is a large scale, dedicated real-world training facility to accelerate the development of Optimus. The Academy will deploy thousands of Optimus units, potentially 10,000 to 30,000 robots, in a controlled realistic environment where they perform self-play, experiment with tasks, iterate on behaviors, and continuously generate training data through trial and error. The Tesla bots will also run millions of simulations in Tesla’s high-fidelity physics-accurate engine, allowing Optimus to close the “sim-to-real gap” by using these real-world observations to refine and validate the simulations! “You’re actually highlighting an important limitation and difference from cars. We’ll soon have 10 million cars on the road. It’s hard to duplicate that massive training flywheel. For the robot, what we’re going to need to do is build a lot of robots and put them in kind of an Optimus Academy so they can do self-play in reality. We’re actually building that out. We can have at least 10,000 Optimus robots, maybe 20-30,000, that are doing self-play and testing different tasks. Tesla has quite a good reality generator, a physics-accurate reality generator, that we made for the cars. We’ll do the same thing for the robots. We actually have done that for the robots. So you have a few tens of thousands of humanoid robots doing different tasks. You can do millions of simulated robots in the simulated world. You use the tens of thousands of robots in the real world to close the simulation to reality gap. Close the sim-to-real gap.”

Teslaconomics

42,563 views • 4 months ago

🧐Applying world models to improve real-world policy on challenging manipulation tasks used to be considered out of reach. 😌After sustained effort, we’re now seeing encouraging progress. 🚀Thrilled to introduce RISE: Self-Improving Robot Policy with Compositional World Model RISE is, to our knowledge, the first work to use a world model as an effective learning environment for challenging real-world manipulation, enabling policy improvement on tasks that demand high dynamics, dexterity, and precision. Incredible teamwork with Kunyang Lin Hongyang Li Yue Xiangyu Hao Zhao Chonghao Sima

🧐Applying world models to improve real-world policy on challenging manipulation tasks used to be considered out of reach. 😌After sustained effort, we’re now seeing encouraging progress. 🚀Thrilled to introduce RISE: Self-Improving Robot Policy with Compositional World Model RISE is, to our knowledge, the first work to use a world model as an effective learning environment for challenging real-world manipulation, enabling policy improvement on tasks that demand high dynamics, dexterity, and precision. Incredible teamwork with Kunyang Lin Hongyang Li Yue Xiangyu Hao Zhao Chonghao Sima

Jiazhi Yang

75,955 views • 4 months ago

Bob McGrew, Former Research Chief at OpenAI: "Manipulation is the hard problem we need to solve to make humanoid robots useful, not locomotion. One video of a humanoid slowly performing tasks with its hands is worth a dozen clips of choreographed routines."

Bob McGrew, Former Research Chief at OpenAI: "Manipulation is the hard problem we need to solve to make humanoid robots useful, not locomotion. One video of a humanoid slowly performing tasks with its hands is worth a dozen clips of choreographed routines."

The Humanoid Hub

95,240 views • 1 year ago

Happy to announce mimic-one: a Scalable Model Recipe for General Purpose Robot Dexterity, the culmination of years of research work in dexterous manipulation with imitation learning.

Happy to announce mimic-one: a Scalable Model Recipe for General Purpose Robot Dexterity, the culmination of years of research work in dexterous manipulation with imitation learning.

Elvis Nava

20,238 views • 1 year ago

Teaching robots to perform dexterous manipulation tasks currently requires teleoperation, which limits demonstration quality, speed, and scalability. Instead, why not use human videos? The problem is that a human hand isn’t a robot hand, so data must be retargeted using simulation to resolve issues like collisions and interpenetration when controlling the hand. In VideoManip, Hongyi Chen and co-authors built a system to solve this problem, taking in RGB videos of humans performing manipulation tasks and using them to create accurate simulations with which to learn robot policies. Watch episode #73 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, now to learn more!

Teaching robots to perform dexterous manipulation tasks currently requires teleoperation, which limits demonstration quality, speed, and scalability. Instead, why not use human videos? The problem is that a human hand isn’t a robot hand, so data must be retargeted using simulation to resolve issues like collisions and interpenetration when controlling the hand. In VideoManip, Hongyi Chen and co-authors built a system to solve this problem, taking in RGB videos of humans performing manipulation tasks and using them to create accurate simulations with which to learn robot policies. Watch episode #73 of RoboPapers, hosted by Michael Cho - Rbt/Acc and Chris Paxton, now to learn more!

RoboPapers

27,249 views • 2 months ago

Need help in the real world? RoboVQA can guide robots and humans through long-horizon tasks on a phone via Google Meet. We release a dataset of 800k (video, question/answer) with robots & humans doing various long-horizon tasks. Data: Google DeepMind

Need help in the real world? RoboVQA can guide robots and humans through long-horizon tasks on a phone via Google Meet. We release a dataset of 800k (video, question/answer) with robots & humans doing various long-horizon tasks. Data: Google DeepMind

Pierre Sermanet

64,369 views • 2 years ago