Entrepreneurs get people to change their beliefs about how the world works. I will keep bringing you VR. Someday the magic gets good enough to convince everyone. But it sure is hard to do that today. So not for everyone. Artur is one of those who keeps trying to change reality. I love him for that.

Christoph Schell runs KUKA, the company that built one of the first industrial robots, Famulus, in 1973 and now has close to 600,000 robots working in factories around the world. Now KUKA is betting on physical AI. The idea is to combine the deterministic automation KUKA is known for with robots that understand a situation and act on intent, so that even older machines can learn new tricks. I sat down with Christoph to talk about where the training data for physical AI really comes from, why KUKA is growing faster than the market in China, robotics as a service, and why he sees humanoids as one form factor among many mobile robots rather than a category of their own. Christoph told me why this shift feels different from anything he’s seen before: “We’re not disrupting the old industry. We are evolving it.” This is a conversation about physical AI on real factory floors, the business models that come with it, and why the industry’s deployment timelines may be too ambitious. 00:00 Intro and KUKA’s first robot 00:40 What physical AI changes for existing robots 01:45 KUKA’s installed base and factory data 02:40 Automation 2.0: the bin-picking example 03:35 Selling intent-based automation to factories 04:45 Where physical-AI training data comes from 06:15 What data gets you to the 99,99999% reliability 07:10 Robotics as a service 08:25 KUKA’s growth in China 09:40 What does scaling mean for KUKA? 10:45 Why KUKA built a US AI team? 11:35 Is the robotics timeline too ambitious? 12:53 Humanoids versus other mobile robots 14:35 What industrial leaders will need in 2036 ~~  ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Robot autonomously steered by AI in the cloud. At the Long Horizon Summit, @Ryan_Resolution showed me an compelling demo of MakerMods arms being controlled by Dream Lab's latest world-action model through a public API. @makermodsai @dreamlabs_ai

By complete coincidence, SVVR in the San Francisco Bay Area, Lonestar XR in Dallas - Fort Worth, and Seattle XR October meetups are all running simultaneously this Thursday night! Should we connect them through video chat or a VR Chat world?

with @replika we've created a ton of design primitives for ai chat that are now common place - from chat suggestions to ai memory with @wabi we're creating new design primitives for AI operating system. chat permissions - being able to set AI access to your info in a particular chats - is going to be the default for all agentic chat products

The “outrage” over Apple putting a touchscreen on a MacBook is so supremely dumb. You don’t have to use it. macOS functions like normal if you’re on the trackpad or a mouse. *Nothing* looks different. You can even disable touch in settings. The OLED benefits are plentiful.

apple has introduced a new input modality on the mac without demonstrating a compelling new interaction model to pair with it at all or even any meaningful changes to the user interface for touch. that has never ever happened in the history of apple, & that has got to send shivers down the spine of anyone following the company. worse, there is no face id, there is no cellular connectivity, & there is no meaningful new design. what is happening?! i am completely lost.

40 projects. One day. Gemma running 100% on-device. Hundreds of builders joined us for the Google Gemma Hardware Hackathon with @GoogleDeepMind, the builder finale to Open Source AI Week. $60K in cash prizes. Here’s what they built: 🧵

Introducing AI Producer, the AI editor that learns from viral videos. Pick a trending style, drop a URL, or upload a file, and it edits your raw footage in that style. Try for FREE in ChatGPT & Claude!

This is quite the deep insight into what a team / company can look like when you build and scale agent- first instead of people- first. The thoughtfulness of the scaffolding and constitution you need to empower humans to then manage swarms of agents is impressive

World models like Odyssey-3 can now simulate general environments with far greater physical accuracy, all in real time. The knowledge learned by models like Odyssey-3 can also power robots, humanoids, driverless cars, and drones. And world models are just getting started!

I'm sponsored by their competitor, Viture: it's an American company, whereas XREAL is headquartered in China, and I like supporting American companies. Even though a Chinese one was launched in my home. @insta360. I love them too. First camera company to use AI/computer vision to move the image around. @XREAL_Global has been doing groundbreaking work for a long time. I've checked them out at CES the last couple of years and other places, and I have a pair myself. They make amazing products. Google has all my data, and has more data about the world than almost any company because of their work in mapping and autonomous cars. They also run my TV, my email, my photos, my videos, my location, my calendar, and I'm probably forgetting about five things that Google runs in my life (oh yeah, spreadsheets and documents, and on and on). Therefore, Google should win in this new genre of AI-driven glasses. Viture is launching a new product that I really love in a few weeks, and it'll be interesting to see the comparisons between all of them. I'll do my own, but you know I'm biased because one's paying my bills. And they also pay the bills of Asher, Sam, and Irena. When I talk to the company executives of @getVITURE Viture, they recognize this reality, too. They know they have to step the game way up to really have a chance against XREAL, who has partnered with Google. They started making glasses for gamers. And won a loyal fan base. We're not even through the first quarter of the game. And Zuckerberg has quite a product coming out too. At CES, you're going to see a variety of Chinese glasses from a variety of Chinese vendors. I'll be visiting all the companies at CES and trying to break them up into different categories so people can figure out which ones they might buy. I saw the Snap Specs today and I really loved them: not really for walking around the city, but for working on a plane. I opened a spreadsheet in them, and yeah, it wasn't the sharpest screen I've ever seen. But it was god enough. Especially in a world where agents do all your work. The new Apple laptop that was shown today looks pretty compelling, too, although I bought a new iMac for a different reason. I think the new one to beat is actually Snap. If it were just more competitive on price, it would have a real shot at winning a lot of hearts and minds. Personal note to Evan Spiegel @evanspiegel : whether you win or lose in this new game, you can go to sleep tonight knowing you built a great product. This post wasn’t contracted (it is extra and from my heart,)so I don’t count it as a paid post. Even though it sort of is.