Sergey Levine, one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, thinks we’re on the cusp of a “self-improvement flywheel” for general-purpose robots. His median estimate for when robots will be able to run households entirely autonomously? 2030.

If Sergey’s right, the world 5 years from now will be an insanely different place than it is today. This conversation focuses on understanding how we get there: we dive into foundation models for robotics, and how we scale both the data and the hardware necessary to enable a full-blown robotics explosion.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) – Timeline to widely deployed autonomous robots

(00:22:12) – Why robotics will scale faster than self-driving cars

(00:32:15) – How vision-language-action models work

(00:50:26) – Improvements needed for brainlike efficiency

(01:02:48) – Learning from simulation

(01:14:08) – How much will robots speed up AI buildouts?

(01:22:54) – If hardware’s the bottleneck, does China win by default?

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Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

Dwarkesh Podcast