I've been a bit quiet on X recently. The past year has been a transformational experience. Grok-4 and Kimi K2 are awesome, but the world of robotics is a wondrous wild west. It feels like NLP in 2018 when GPT-1 was published, along with BERT and a thousand other flowers that bloomed. No one knew which one would eventually become ChatGPT. Debates were heated. Entropy was sky high. Ideas were insanely fun.

I believe the GPT-1 of robotics is already somewhere on Arxiv, but we don't know exactly which one. Could be world models, RL, learning from human video, sim2real, real2sim, etc. etc, or any combo of them. Debates are heated. Entropy is sky high. Ideas are insanely fun, instead of squeezing the last few % on AIME & GPQA.

The nature of robotics also greatly complicates the design space. Unlike the clean world of bits for LLMs (text strings), we roboticists have to deal with the messy world of atoms. After all, there's a lump of software-defined metal in the loop. LLM normies may find it hard to believe, but so far roboticists still can't agree on a benchmark! Different robots have different capability envelopes - some are better at acrobatics while others at object manipulation. Some are meant for industrial use while others are for household tasks. Cross-embodiment isn't just a research novelty, but an essential feature for a universal robot brain.

I've talked to dozens of C-suite leads from various robot companies, old and new. Some sell the whole body. Some sell body parts such as dexterous hands. Many more others sell the shovels to manufacture new bodies, create simulations, or collect massive troves of data. The business idea space is as wild as research itself. It's a new gold rush, the likes of which we haven't seen since the 2022 ChatGPT wave.

The best time to enter is when non-consensus peaks. We're still at the start of a loss curve - there're strong signs of life, but far, far away from convergence. Every gradient step takes us into the unknown. But one thing I do know for sure - there's no AGI without touching, feeling, and being embodied in the messy world.

On a more personal note - running a research lab comes with a whole new level of responsibility. Giving updates directly to the CEO of a $4T company is, to put it mildly, both thrilling and all-consuming of my attention weights. Gone are the days when I could stay on top of and dive deep into every AI news.

I’ll try to carve out time to share more of my journey.