FULL INTERVIEW: Brian Potter says robots learned kung fu before they learned to pick things up because motion is easy to train in simulation and grabbing objects isn't. The fix catching on now is putting "Hulk hands" with cameras on humans to record the data.
@_brianpotter writes Construction Physics and is a senior infrastructure fellow at
@IFP. He joined
@theojaffee and
@schisofrenia to break down how AI drives robots, why prefab houses still can't beat hand tools, and the rise and fall of the plasma screen:
00:56 the rise and fall of the plasma screen
04:40 how vision-language-action models drive robots
06:33 why data is the hardest part of robotics
07:46 GPT-6 Astra, and whether frontier models make robot models obsolete
09:51 teleoperation vs simulation
10:18 why robots can do kung fu but can't grab things
11:07 UMI, or giving humans Hulk hands
11:56 how to actually learn how things get built
16:47 why prefab houses still can't beat hand tools
18:12 if we can prefab chips, why not houses
19:07 why cheap robots could fix construction