Why Robots Still Struggle With Simple Tasks (And What Might Finally Change That) | Karol Hausman, Co-Founder & CEO of Physical Intelligence

Speaker A: The more robots you deploy, the better the models should get, because I think the models will keep on getting better. They'll be able to absorb more and more data. As I started looking into robotics and started studying it, it was very disappointing. It seemed like there are no intelligent robots out there and no one was working on them. Every robot you would see would be this pre-programmed machine that just goes from A to B and does it repeatedly and has no intelligence whatsoever. That was maybe like a wake-up call.

So many people excited about this future that we saw in the movies that we read about in the books, and it seems like no one is working on it. We had this one particular experiment with a Coke can in front of a robot and 3 pictures of different celebrities in front of it. And the prompt we gave to the model we built was put the Coke can on picture of Taylor Swift. The robot picked it up and then slowly moved it towards Taylor Swift, all from internet data. That was the moment where it clicked for us that where you can bring in a lot of prior knowledge from LLMs, from the internet, and connect it to robot motions.

And it felt like it opened another door. Maybe, just maybe, if we do everything right, if we combine it with internet knowledge, if we scale it up, if we do all of the pieces that need to be done, it might work. And at At that point, it became clear that the way to accomplish this is to create an organization whose sole purpose is to solve physical intelligence. Speaker B: We taught machines to beat the world's best chess players long before we taught them to reliably fold a towel or carry a coffee cup.