I said "auto-regressive LLMs, in and of themselves, will not lead human-level AI" That statement is still totally true. First, the reasoning abilities of current AI systems are based non-auto-regressive search (which is what I have always advocated for). But AFAICT, they do it in token space, which is limited and inefficient. I have claimed that human-like reasoning must be a search in continuous representation space. It looks like the industry is moving towards that. Second, the self-improvement methods, as currently practiced, only work for domains where the quality of outputs can be scored without human intervention, such as mathematics, code, and scenarios that can be simulated accurately. Not anything else. Humans and animals learn new skills way more efficiently than current RL methods. Third, the multimodal capabilities of current AI assistants generally use separately-trained encoders (that are not LLMs). This is also what I've been advocating. Except that I think the best way to do this is with JEPA trained with self-supervised learning. The research community is clearly moving towards that (3000 papers on JEPA in just 4 years). Fourth, if LLMs were a path to human-level AI, we would have domestic robots and Level-4 or Level-5 self-driving cars for consumers by now. And we don't. We certainly don't have cars that can learn to drive in 20 hours or practice like any teenager. We're still missing something pretty huge to claim human-level intelligence (let alone superhuman). Sure, we now have computer systems that are impressive, very useful, and whose performance is superhuman in an increasing number of domains (coding being one of them). But that's true of the entire history of progress in computer technology. Lastly, there is a basic confusion about what intelligence actually is. It is not the mere accumulation and regurgitation of existing declarative knowledge (which is essentially what LLMs do). As Jean Piaget famously said, "intelligence is not what you know, it is what you do when you don't know." It is your ability to solve new problem without any prior training, to act in previously-unknown scenarios, and to adapt very quickly to new situations with minimal training. We're still far from that.

GPT-6 Astra test 4/n Prompt: "Implement pen spinning with a dexterous hand. Use Isaac Lab for RL training, use the Sharpa hand, and create the pen mesh yourself. Give me a trained RL policy and a visualization video. You are free to search the web and download papers or anything else you need." After running autonomously for a day and a half (including training the policy), this is what we got: Credit: my student Chengyang Li

I think we'll see 5x the number of people become hardware and robotics founders over the next 18 months Why? Because you can rent every step, from design to manufacturing: DESIGN - Astra to drive Blender, FreeCAD, and KiCad the way a person would, so you get editable geometry instead of a dead render. Zoo dot dev's text to CAD API if you want it programmatic. - Or have Claude write build123d code, which is Python parametric CAD, and there's a Claude Code plugin that runs it and exports the STL for you. PROTOTYPE - Bambu A1 mini is $299, P1S around $399 on sale. Or skip owning one, JLC3DP prints and mails it for about $20. PCBWay does resin, SLS, and CNC if plastic won't cut it. ELECTRONICS - KiCad for the board, Astra can drive it. JLCPCB fabricates and assembles, often under $100 for a small run. ESP32 for wifi, Raspberry Pi if it needs a brain. ANYTHING THAT MOVES - Unitree sells a Go2 with a full SDK for about $2,500. - Hugging Face put out a $399 open-source biped. - LeRobot gives you the whole train in sim, deploy to real pipeline, and Physical Intelligence open-sourced π0 so you're fine-tuning instead of starting from zero. - Prototype the policy in MuJoCo or Isaac Lab first. MANUFACTURING - Alibaba RFQ for the first 100 units. Check 1688 to see what the factory actually charges domestically, then negotiate. Pietra or Sourcify if you want someone to handle it. FULFILLMENT AND SELLING - ShipBob or Amazon FBA. Shopify for the store, TikTok Shop for distribution, Kickstarter if you want the money before you build it. How to think about starting your own robotics or hardware company: 1. Pick a niche that's already buying weird gear. Cyclists, tabletop gamers, beekeepers, home baristas, dog people with mobility issues. These groups spend money on specific objects and complain in public about what doesn't exist. Or grab ideas off 2. Go read the complaints. Reddit, IG etc Search "I wish someone made," "does anyone make," and "modified my." That last one is the best signal, because someone already hacked the product together and you're just manufacturing what they built by hand. Also check Etsy!! If 3 sellers are doing a janky 3D printed version with 400 reviews each, the market is validated. 3. Make one. Describe it to Astra or Claude, get the CAD, print it in ugly gray PLA, use it, fix it. 4. Only go to Alibaba or similar once you've sold a few. Message 10 suppliers through RFQ, take the third cheapest, always pay the $50 for a sample before the real order. 5. Film everything from day 1. The first ugly print, the failed version, the box of 100 arriving. That's your entire marketing budget, and hardware is one of the few categories where people actually want to watch the thing get made. 6. Raise the price. Almost everyone here anchors on what the plastic cost. Your customer is comparing you to nothing, because the alternative is the product doesn't exist. Start at 5x COGS and go up. THIS GOAL OF THIS POST IS JUST HERE TO GET YOUR CREATIVE JUICES FLOWING. Of course, you can build robotics/hardware in a bunch of different ways. One thing I've learned is data couldn't be more important when you're building a hardware/robotics startups. These models learn from first person video of a human doing the task, and that footage doesn't exist for almost any job. So basically you pick one repetitive job people quit over, film someone doing it for 2 weeks, fine-tune π0 on that footage, use organic to sell the first few units and figure out scaling, 5 years ago you needed a factory, a supply chain, and a $1M just to find out if anyone wanted the thing. Now, anyone can become a hardware/robitics founder. And I suspect a lot of people will become one! Vibe manufacturers.

I’m excited to announce that my online shop is now live. A curated collection of robotic hardware, now available with simple, all-in pricing. No hidden costs. No extra domestic shipping fees. Orders ship domestically from the U.S. with short lead times. Explore the shop:

Introducing OM-1, our first robot foundation model, zero-shot generalizing to any robot: table-top arms, industrial arms and humanoids. - learned directly from human manipulation data - no teleop/robot data - close to human-level dexterity and efficiency - multi-robot collab

Congrats on the launch @pollenrobotics. A few genuine questions, mostly around positioning: Who is this actually for? The branding reads as kids, but the ad shows adults playing against each other. That mismatch is a bit confusing, I assume parents seeing this may be tempted to buy it for children, so why no kids in the ad? Which raises the safety question: the design is cool, but the exterior looks unfinished, motors and internals still exposed, and it's quite noisy. For an adult developer/hobbyist audience that can be fine, but for kids maybe it's a real concern. Honest question: is this a finished consumer product, or a dev/hobbyist platform? Being explicit about that would clear up both the positioning and the safety expectation.

I don’t think Americans understand how behind we are in robotics. - Most “American” humanoids e.g. Figure/Optimus using Chinese parts. - Not shipping a single bipedal humanoid. - US is producing small batches of 10-20 for R&D while China is shipping tens of thousands.