Pod Insights Y Combinator Podcast Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything About this episode Chelsea Finn on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco. From MIT through her PhD at Berkeley, where she pioneered meta‑learning methods, and Google Brain, Chelsea Finn has built her career around teaching machines how to learn. Now an Assistant Professor at Stanford and co‑founder of Physical Intelligence, she’s using that foundation to bring learning-driven robotics into messy, real-world environments rather than confined lab setups. In this talk, Chelsea traces the evolution of her team’s work—from early experiments on robotic grasping and vision to today’s ambitious efforts at folding laundry, tidying kitchens, and generalizing across tasks—all without hand-crafted code. Instead, they used scalable foundation models and massive datasets, teaching robots physical common sense as they learn by doing. She shares stories of the rocky setbacks, the surprises hidden in data, and the moment it all clicked: robots equipped with generalizable physical intelligence can indeed adapt and assist in the unpredictable world around us.
Transcript 8,386 words · 10 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to talk about developing general-purpose robots and how we might actually truly develop and bring intelligence into the physical world. So to start off, I'd like to talk about this problem, which is that if you want to truly solve a robotics application, you essentially need to build an entire company around that application. You need to build a different company for logistics, for wet lab automation, for robots in kitchens, for surgical robots, and so on. And this is really, really hard to do because that company needs to make new hardware, develop custom software, design unique movement primitives for that application, handle edge cases, and so on. You have to do all of that from scratch
0:45 Speaker 00 if you want to solve a robotics problem. And as a result, a lot of robotics companies haven't been very successful in actually bringing robots into the physical world successfully in our daily lives. I co-founded a company called Physical Intelligence that's trying to solve this problem. And in particular, we're trying to develop a general-purpose model that can enable any robot to do any task in any environment. And we think that this sort of generalist model may work better and be easier to use than purpose-built models, just like we've seen in the development of foundation models for language and other applications. For example, if you want to build a coding assistant,
1:28 Speaker 00 you don't nowadays develop something specifically for coding, but you develop and you build on models that were trained on large amounts of data, not just on code. And essentially, this is the problem of trying to develop these sorts of foundation models and bring this sort of intelligence into the physical world rather than the digital world, where they largely are today. So how do we do this? In this talk, I'd like to talk about how we go about doing this. And if we were to take a lesson from language models, we know that language models have taught us the importance of scale. And so one possible conclusion would be that perhaps scale is the most important ingredient for developing these models. And if you were to say this conclusion is true, then...
2:14 Speaker 00 You might look to certain data sources for large-scale data. So for example, we might look at data from industrial automation. And you get tons and tons of data of robots doing tasks over and over again like this. But this sort of data isn't going to allow robots to go into disaster zones, or to make a sandwich, or to bag groceries. And so this massive scale doesn't have the diversity of behaviors that we need in order to solve this general problem. Alternatively, maybe we look at data from YouTube, which has also a massive data source, and many videos of humans doing tasks that could be useful for training robots. But at the same time, we don't learn how to write by watching other people write, and we don't become expert tennis players by watching Wimbledon.
2:57 Speaker 00 And so even though there's a massive scale of data here, it's very challenging to use, and there's also a gap between the embodiment of robots and humans. And lastly, we might look at data from simulation. And you can also get a massive scale of data here, but this data lacks realism and also has a gap from reality. And so I think the lesson here is that scale is necessary for developing these models that can generalize in open-world conditions, but they're subordinate to actually solving the problem. So you need scale, but it's not sufficient for the entire problem. And so at Physical Intelligence, we've been... This is an example of a data episode that we've collected. This is in honor of our first anniversary, which was a few months ago,
3:40 Speaker 00 where we... Here you can see a teleoperator in person who's operating some leader arms to control the robot to light a match and light a candle with the match. And with this sort of data, we can train robots to do a variety of different tasks. And so what I'd like to talk about is some of our recent results trying to develop sort of physical intelligence with large-scale real robot data. I should mention this is large-scale by today's robot standards, and arguably a miniscule amount of data compared to the sorts of robot data that we should have in the years to come. And so in particular, we'll be looking at whether robots can do a variety of Dextrous Long Horizon tasks, whether robots can succeed in places they've never been, whether robots can respond to open-ended... And interjections.
4:26 Speaker 00 And even if you're not excited about robotics, I think that the lessons that we've learned from trying to address these problems are applicable outside of the physical world. So can we develop robots that can have complete dexterous, long-horizon tasks? And in particular, in this first part, I'd like to talk about how we trained a Py0 Foundation model to do this task, which is to unload a dryer and fold laundry. And to date, I think this is the most impressive thing that I've seen a robot do in the physical world. It's really hard.
5:04 Speaker 00 This is an incredibly difficult problem. You can see that it's not perfect. Here is making some misgraps, making some mistakes. But it's really, really hard because you have to deal with the variability in the clothes and the way in which they might be positioned and crumpled and be able to handle all those sorts of things. And as you're doing this task, which takes about 10 minutes for the robot, there's many opportunities to fail, to fail catastrophically. For example, dropping things on the ground, which is hard to recover from. And you have to be able to recover from even small mistakes. I was personally actually working quite a bit on this laundry folding robot along with Michael and Suraj, of course, supported and with contributions from the whole physical intelligence team. So how do you even approach this sort of problem?
5:49 Speaker 00 This is a really, really hard thing for a robot to do. And what we did is we started simple. We started with can a robot fold a single-size, single-brand shirt? And can a robot dynamically flatten one shirt? Again, single-brand, single-size. And if you start simple, this makes the problem quite a bit easier. We collected some data with teleoperation and trained a policy with imitation learning. And our model had around 100 million parameters, mapping from images from the robot's cameras to target joint positions on the robot arms. And we do this source of control at 50 Hz on the robot. And we founded the company in kind of mid-March of 2024. And a couple of months later, after we had set everything up, we were able to get a policy
6:33 Speaker 00 that could fairly reliably fold a single-size, single-brand shirt. You can see that I'm testing the policy right here. And we also wanted to test some dynamic motions, because you need to be able to match the control frequency accurately in order to do these sorts of dynamic motions. And so these were some of our very initial tests at addressing this sort of laundry folding problem. Then from there, we wanted to make the problem incrementally harder. And so instead of starting from the shirt flat on the table, we started in a crumpled position, like these. And it turns out that this actually makes it a lot harder. And so here are some videos of some of our initial attempts at trying to train the robot to fold these shirts. And the robot struggles.
7:18 Speaker 00 The robot does some things that kind of look somewhat sensible, but generally isn't able to make progress on the task. With many tests, we frequently were getting 0% success rate in our tests of this system, and really struggling to make progress. So really here is the it introduces this challenge of handling the sorts of variability in the ways in which shirts might be crumpled on the table. We had some initial signs of life in late June of last year. And so in this case, the robot was able to kind of make progress on flattening the shirt. It's also then able to fold the shirt decently well from that initial state, still not perfect. And as you can see, it takes quite a while to do this. So this is a video that was sped up adex.
8:00 Speaker 00 So not something that you might have the patience for a robot to do.
8:06 Speaker 00 So with some initial signs of life, also very low success rate, we started to transition to a slightly harder version of the task, where the laundry starts in a laundry basket. We also introduced variable-sized shirts and shorts into the mix. And again, the robot really struggled. So in many of our tests, we're getting 0% success rate across the board. And we're really struggling to actually get the robots to learn how to do these tasks. At this point, we were trying to consider a lot of different things. We thought that maybe the robot needs memory, needs history in some way. Maybe we need to just train our models for longer. Maybe we should be doing control and end effector space rather than in joint space of the robot. Maybe our encoders, we knew that there were calibration issues and maybe we need that calibration to be more consistent.
8:50 Speaker 00 Maybe we need to condition the model on more information about the data. Maybe we need hierarchy because this is a pretty long horizon task and it needs to break it down into different subtasks. Maybe we need higher resolution images. Maybe we need to introduce kind of interventions in data collection. A lot of these things we also tried. We had around two to three months of failure where nothing was really working at addressing this task. But then at some point, we actually had a bit of a breakthrough, which was that we found one thing that really seemed to make a difference in the robot's ability to do the task. And this was actually to take some inspiration from the world of language modeling. To actually, instead of just training a policy on all of our data, we pre-train on all the data and then fine tune on a curated, consistent, high-quality set of demonstration data.
9:36 Speaker 00 When we did this, we found that the robot was actually able to make progress and a lot more reliably fold articles of clothing. And so I think that this video was the first video where the robot was able to fold five items in a row and stack them. I went home very excited this day. This was in September of 2024, so multiple months after our initial tests. Now, this is far from perfect. It takes 20 minutes to fold five items of clothes. And at the same time, though, it kind of suggested that this sort of recipe was able to unlock the capability in the robot to actually fold these articles of clothing. So you can see these sorts of failures here. In this case, it attempted to fold the blue shirt around seven times
10:21 Speaker 00 before eventually actually figuring out how to do that. There's also other failure modes as well. So here's an example where the robot pushes the stack to the corner of the table and decides to kind of fiddle with it a bit and then eventually slides it off the table. And then it proceeds as if nothing happened and it's going to continue to fold. We continue to iterate on this recipe. We selected and worked on our curation strategy for curating a higher quality set of demonstration data. We got it from 20 minutes down to 12 minutes for these five items. This is kind of how we were evaluating how good our robot system was. It still makes mistakes. It's still, the fold quality still varies, but it's still significantly better than our previous curation recipe.
11:03 Speaker 00 Now, at this point, we were still training models largely, kind of, we were pre-training and fine-tuning only on laundry data, and we weren't leveraging kind of pre-trained models in the community. And there were some folks working at Physical Intelligence that were working on developing a pre-trained model, trained on all of the robot data. And we then started to try to introduce these models into our, into our recipe. And so we took an open source vision language model, a three billion parameter model called PolyGemma. Previously, we were using, previous videos were all with like 100 to 300 million parameters that we were iterating on. This model takes as input images from the robot, also a language command, and then has a head, a diffusion head, that's going to attend to all the internal values of the vision language model
11:48 Speaker 00 and with the joint angles, predict a chunk of 50 actions into the future, so about one second of, of action steps. And we're using a flow matching, a variant of diffusion, to actually output these actions and output continuous actions. So we took this pre-trained, this model, instead of pre-training only on laundry, we pre-trained on all of the robot data that we had collected. And then we just fine-tuned it with the same exact post-training recipe that we had developed without using the vision language models. When we did this, we actually saw the robot continue to actually get better when we just plugged in that new pre-trained model. And so in the left video, it's able to do five items in nine minutes, which was faster than the 12 minutes we had before.
12:32 Speaker 00 In the right videos, we were testing with some novel clothing items and found that it was also quite efficient at folding multiple items in a row. And we also saw as a result, there's also more consistent fold quality by using this model that was about 10 times larger and had seen more robot data as input. To look at a few highlights of this, here is a pair of shorts that the robot hasn't seen before. And this is kind of a tricky scenario where to flatten it, it actually kind of needs to reach under the kind of the bottom of the shorts. And it's able to do that, it's able to kind of figure out that it should reach under the left part of the shorts in order to eventually flatten it. And then, once it actually successfully flattens it, it's able to fold it successfully.
13:17 Speaker 00 It also has to do something similar at times to fold shirts. So in this case, it needs to actually kind of fold the shirt over on itself with actually, puts it in a more crumpled state arguably, but allows it to find the corners of the shirt and then go ahead and fold it.
13:31 Speaker 00 And then, like I mentioned, it also is able to handle unseen clothing items. So here's an example of a shirt with a V-neck that is able to fold even though like the the post-training data set didn't have, well, didn't, the shirt was completely held out and the post-training data set didn't have any V-necks as input in the data set. It's also able to fold shirts with buttons, so it has some degree of generalization to different clothing items.
13:55 Speaker 00 And then, lastly, because this policy is a neural network and it's kind of taking as input the current image, it's able to handle interruptions. So here, Michael is continuing to mess with the robot and the robot figures out that it should put the shirt away while it's trying to fold the other shirt. In this case, Michael's going to continue messing with the robot, so Michael unfolds one side. And the robot reacts. Michael goes in again.
14:27 Speaker 00 And the robot makes some mistakes here, but is able to recover. Michael messes it up again. So those are some results of what the robot's able to do. Now, I talked about this pre-training and post-training recipe being really important. We can actually quantitatively measure that and actually Make sure that this is actually what's leading to improvement. So we compared this pre-training and post-training recipe to not using any pre-training and only training on the curated data set versus no post-training where you're training on all of the data rather than fine-tuning on the curated data set. And we evaluated these models in terms of their progress on the task, where you make partial progress for getting it out of the bin, which is the easiest part, and then further progress for flattening, folding, and stacking the items.
15:09 Speaker 00 And we see that the pre-training and post-training recipe is able to get far higher performance than omitting pre-training and omitting post-training. And notably, omitting pre-training and post-training is basically able to get it out of the bin and make very little progress after that, whereas when we combine pre-training and curated post-training, we get far higher performance, whereas able to reliably flatten and fold objects. And then the last thing I'll mention on this note is that nothing in this recipe is specific to laundry, and so we took the same recipe and fine-tuned on other tasks. So here, the task is to kind of clean up a table, and the robot is also able to successfully
15:50 Speaker 00 do this task despite the fact that we primarily were iterating a lot on laundry, but is able to also apply this recipe to this task. It also is able to scoop coffee beans into a coffee grinder. This task is pretty hard. It has to construct the bottom part of a cardboard box, which requires quite a bit of dexterity, and then lastly, autonomously lighting a candle with a match, again with this kind of same pre-training and post-training recipe. And so this is pointing at this kind of the benefit of foundation models that I alluded to before, which is that to do these different tasks, you don't have to start completely from scratch. You can actually leverage pre-training across multiple robots and across multiple tasks.
16:36 Speaker 00 And then we're also able to apply that same recipe to robots at other companies. This is a robot that I've actually never seen in person before. They collected data, they sent the data to us. We fine tuned our model on their data. We actually didn't even know exactly how the model is being controlled, exactly the representation of their actions. But by fine tuning the model on this new robot, the model is able to control the robot in order to make a cup of coffee in this case. So some takeaways for this part. We were able to independently develop post-training and pre-training and decouple the problem and then eventually get the best of both. We found that training on all the data doesn't work for complex tasks.
17:18 Speaker 00 And this sort of pre-training and post-training on curated data leads to far better performance. And then we broke up this really hard problem of folding laundry by gradually starting with folding single shirts and going to more and more complex versions of the task. Now, there's a number of limitations here. And one limitation I'd like to point out is that these robots inevitably, in this case, were trained in the environments that they were tested. And so this means that in principle, you can use these methods to collect a lot of data in one environment and then deploy them in one environment. But ultimately, there's going to be things that change about an environment and scenarios where we would want to actually apply these robots to environments that they've never seen in before. And so how can robots actually succeed in places that they've never been?
18:02 Speaker 00 The lesson we've learned from machine learning in other places is that we should collect diverse data. And so we started by collecting data of tidying bedrooms and kitchens in many different environments. And here's an example, kind of a sample of that data. And we collected robot data in homes across San Francisco here and also collected data in diverse mock kitchens and mock bedrooms. And in total, we had more than 100 unique rooms represented in the dataset. That ended up being a part of a bigger pre-training mixture. So we trained on this diverse mobile manipulation data, including the low-level action prediction, as well as predicting high-level subtask commands for how to complete the task. But we also trained on previously collected
18:46 Speaker 00 static manipulation data that was also fairly diverse, static manipulation data that we had collected in our office and in labs, as well as web data and high-level instructional data. And I should point out here that the mobile manipulation data of tidying bedrooms and kitchens only accounted for 2.4% of the overall pre-training mix. And so the lesson here is that you were basically able to spin up a new task and actually an entirely new robot. The rest of the mixture didn't have any mobile manipulation data with this particular mobile manipulator in it without redoing all of the data collection. We were able to build upon everything that had been done before. And it's kind of this same story of foundation models being able to make it easier to spin up a new problem,
19:30 Speaker 00 a new application, without starting from scratch. Now, this wasn't completely easy. We had a couple of challenges. One of the challenges that we ran into is that naively, this model can ignore language instructions. So we actually, in this case, asked it to pick up the cutting board, and it chose to pick up the plate instead. Now, we're again asking it to pick up the cutting board. And instead, the robot had a mind of its own and decided to pick up the plate. And then we tell it to put the plate in the sink. And eventually, it decides that, well, after kind of moving away from the cutting board, it eventually decided that it would actually pick up the cutting board. And so in the early development of our model, we found that it often ignored language.
20:10 Speaker 00 And to solve this, we thought about how vision language models actually follow language well. And so maybe there's a way to preserve the inherent abilities of the pre-trained models when addressing this task. And so what we did is with this Pyzior architecture, this action head that's using diffusion is randomly initialized. And this ends up actually deteriorating the pre-trained knowledge that's present in the vision language model. And we found that if we can prevent this deterioration, we might be able to get better language following. And so the recipe that we came up with was actually in some ways fairly similar. But instead, we're going to be predicting tokenized actions. And then when we have the diffusion head, we'll be stopping the gradient from the randomly initialized
20:54 Speaker 00 diffusion head to prevent it from deteriorating the language following abilities of the VLM backbone. And we found that this first led to faster training because the tokenized actions are a more direct supervision signal. And second, it also followed language far better, an 80% follow rate rather than a 20% follow rate, which suggests that we're able to preserve the kind of pre-training in the vision language model backbone. So we put those pieces together. We took that recipe and trained it, pre-trained it on all of our data, including the mobile manipulation data. We fine-tuned it on mobile manipulation data in a variety of environments. And then we tested the model in places it's never been in before. So we rented three Airbnbs that we had never been to before.
21:38 Speaker 00 We put the robot in those homes, in this case, in the kitchen. And I asked it to close the cabinet. I asked it to put away the dishes. It's also never seen these dishes or these forks, these objects. And the robot's able to succeed even though it's never been the year before. There's different countertops, different furniture, different objects, and so forth. Lastly, I asked it to clean up the spill. And the robot is able to oblige and wipe down the spill and eventually put the sponge into the sink.
22:16 Speaker 00 It's also able to do this for bedrooms. So Laura asked it, in this case, just clean the bedroom. And it puts articles of clothing in, it throws away the trash, and then is able to tidy the bed by putting the pillow at the top of the bed and tidying the blanket or the comforter of the bed.
22:41 Speaker 01 YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com/apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video.
22:54 Speaker 00 So quantitatively, I talked about how there's only 2.7% or something of the mixture. So how much does that other data actually help? Could we actually just train on that 2.7%? And we find that these bars on the right, which are excluding data from static robots in labs and environments and so forth, reduces performance significantly. So the performance goes down to less than 60% when you exclude that data when evaluated in novel homes compared to if you use the full pre-training mixture. It has more than 20% higher performance. Lastly, we also looked at is the diversity of data helpful? Is it important? And so we increased the amount of data from these environments to test this.
23:35 Speaker 00 It's always good to like, you can do vibe evals, but it's really helpful to actually measure how well these things work. And so this is what this is measuring. And we find that if we actually increase the amount of homes, the amount of locations that are represented in the data, the performance increases, which is great. And it actually gets to the same level of performance as if we train on data from that target environment. And so it means we're actually mostly closing the generalization gap. And so just that the bottlenecks at this point for this sort of task lie not in collecting more diverse data, but in actually getting higher reliability and higher performance. Now, I should also mention that there's failure modes. Like the success rate was around 80%. There's lots of room for improvement.
24:20 Speaker 00 Here are a couple of examples of those failure modes. So here it's told to put the items in the drawer. It is able to put it in the drawer, but the art item isn't fully in the drawer at the end and it decides that it's done and moves on to the next thing. Here, the robot needs to put the clothes in the laundry basket. It drives over the shirt and then it gets stuck and is not able to lift it up. Here we asked it to put the dishes in the sink, and it successfully is able to put a number of the dishes in the sink, but it struggles to pick up the cutting board. In this particular case, because it's very thin and it's flush against the surface of the countertop. And in the last case, probably my favorite case, it's told to put the spatula into a drawer, and it decides that the oven looks a lot like a drawer.
25:05 Speaker 00 And so it opens the oven and tries to put it in there. And beyond this, there's also challenges with regard to speed, partial observability, long-term planning. And so, yeah, lots of work to do still. So the takeaway here is that with diverse data, robots can follow a variety of instructions in environments that the robot has never been in before, which is a big step up from a lot of robotic scenarios where they're trained in the scenarios that they are being tested. Now, the last kind of bit I'd like to talk about is this model has a fairly limited instruction set. It can only follow kind of a certain set of commands. And if we think about how other forms of AI technology have been deployed,
25:48 Speaker 00 people really like to customize and actually tell the robot what they want, or tell the system what they want from these kinds of models. And so, just like we prompt language models, can we allow robots to respond to open-ended prompts and open-ended interjections? So to do this and actually to do the past work, we're actually leveraging hierarchical vision-language-action models. So we're going to have a high-level policy break down the prompt into intermediate verbal responses and intermediate atomic language commands. So the high-level prompt might be, can you make me a sandwich? And this high-level policy will break it down into the subtask of pick up one slice of bread. This will be passed to a low-level model
26:32 Speaker 00 that actually executes and predicts target joint angles to fulfill the low-level command of picking up one slice of bread. Now, on its own, this isn't going to be able to follow all sorts of prompts. And it's actually fairly tricky to handle open-ended language because it's going to be challenging to collect a large number of human-robot interactions with the real robot in the loop. And this is also going to be fairly hard to scale. And so what we did is we kind of took all of our existing robot data, and we can actually generate synthetic data for the existing robot data. And particularly, we can use language models to relabel and generate hypothetical human prompts for the scenarios that the robots are in. And so what this looks like is we'll take data that says,
27:17 Speaker 00 here's a kind of a video, and then the next skill is to pick up a Kit Kat, because that's what the robot does next, in terms of just like basic, low-level annotation. And then for this scenario where the robot is about to pick up the Kit Kat, we can ask a vision language model, what is a hypothetical prompt that a human might have asked that led to this particular scenario and the robot to actually choose to pick up a Kit Kat? And then we can train our high-level policy on these synthetic prompts to basically augment the robot data with various human interactions that might have led to those different situations. And as a result of this, we're able to actually allow robots to follow a variety of different prompts. So on the left, we ask, "Hi, robot, can you make me a ham and cheese sandwich?" The robot says, "Sure, I'll start with the bread and add ham and cheese next."
28:01 Speaker 00 It's able to break down this task into the various subtasks of picking up a slice of bread, putting it on the cutting board, picking up a slice of cheese, putting it on the bread, picking up some ham, and so on and so forth. I can also follow more complicated prompts like, "Hi, robot, can you make me a vegan sandwich? I don't like pickles, though." And in this case, it's able to break it down and decide that it's going to add lettuce and tomatoes to the sandwich, and not add pickles, not add cheese, not add meat as well.
28:31 Speaker 00 In addition to prompts, we're also able to train the robot to handle different interjections. Actually, here's a case where of a different kind of prompt. So on the left, we train the robot to clean tables, so put trash away and put dishes into the bin. And on the right, we ask the robot, "Clean up only the trash, but not the dishes." And the robot is able to understand what that means and connect that to its low-level actions, and only put away the trash, and complete when the trash is all put away. And then lastly, it's able to handle interjections and situated corrections. So in this case, the robot is kind of getting items for a user. The user interjects and says- Get me something sweet that's not in the basket. Right after I had put a Kit Kat into the basket. And the robot says, sure, let me get you some Skittles.
29:16 Speaker 00 And reasons through kind of basic reasoning of how to, what's how to fulfill the user's request. And it's able to respond to those kinds of corrections situated in the world that the robot is in. Now, you might also wonder, like, maybe some existing foundation models could serve as a high level planner for robots and do this sort of high level reasoning without actually training a separate model. And so we also evaluated that. And we found that in blue, the performance at following instructions and making progress on the task was substantially lower than the performance of our system, which is shown in green. And in general, we found that these frontier models generally struggle with visual understanding as it pertains to robotics. Which makes sense because in general, these models aren't kind of really targeting
29:59 Speaker 00 many physical applications and have very little data in the physical world. Okay, so to start to wrap up, and then we'll all have some time for questions. I talked a bit about how robots can do a variety of dexterous, long horizon tasks with pre-training and post-training. How robots can succeed in places that they've never been. And how they can respond to open-ended prompts and interjections by leveraging synthetic data from language models on top of the robot data that we had collected. Now, with some closing notes, the, we've seen a few different scenarios in this talk where general-purpose robots might be more successful than specialist robots. But because we can essentially, rather than start from scratch for every single application,
30:40 Speaker 00 actually build upon a much broader foundation for physical intelligence in the real world. We also saw that like large-scale data in the real world is really helpful for developing these things. And we found that, and I think that is necessary, but not sufficient for physical intelligence. And there's a lot of challenges and we need more research to be done ourselves. And through open source contributions, before robots, I think will be truly ready to tackle the open world. I'd also like to mention that at physical intelligence, we're hiring a number of roles. If you're excited about some of the things that we talked about, you can see a list of the open roles on the pi website as well. Awesome.
31:27 Speaker 00 Happy to take some questions. Let's start on the left.
31:29 Speaker 02 Hi Chelsea. So first, I want to say thank you for all your work on robot learning. They're all really impressive. And so mainly, I have two questions on, especially regarding the post-training part you mentioned. So the first thing is, you mentioned that in post-training, the most important part is to have high-quality action data. So I'm wondering what the components of that would be? And then the second question is, what do you think RL will play into the part of post-training?
32:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely. So I think that the different components of it, a lot of it comes down to consistency of the data and the strategy being followed, and whether the robots, whether the data completes the task efficiently and with a reliable strategy. And then on the second question, I think that reinforcement learning can play a very large role in, actually, in post-training. I think that online data from the robots, which reinforcement learning allows you to use, can allow robots to have a much higher success rate and also be faster than if they're just trained with imitation learning.
32:35 Speaker 02 Thank you.
32:37 Speaker 03 Hi. Thank you so much for your talk. So your work is really fascinating and there is no doubt that it will have a lot of impact in the future. But can I ask you, at this stage, how can you find the fundings? Because honestly, I can't imagine how hard it can be to convince people to invest in the robots that falls close and deal with the dishes.
33:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, so it's a good question. I think that, well, I guess first I'll mention that we aren't just focused on applications in the home. We really want to solve this broader problem of physical intelligence. And we've been starting with those applications because they're ones that are kind of easy to make progress on. But we've also been doing tasks like inserting an ethernet cable, which I put in the talk, as well as constructing a cardboard box. And generally, I think that this sort of problem has a ton of potential for like making an impact in all sorts of realms, not just in domestic. Domestic tasks, but all sorts of realms as well. And even in domestic tasks, I think there's a huge market for um for this kind of technology. We ourselves haven't had um a lot of challenge with fundraising.
33:44 Speaker 00 And I think that a lot of robotics companies recently have also done a great job. Um and found that there's actually a lot of excitement around this sort of technology. Because I think things are actually starting to work. Uh I started working on this technology uh more than ten years ago at this point. And things really weren't working then. And so uh yeah, I think that there's a lot of excitement that is starting to mature. And and um like actually be ready for the real world. I think that there's a lot more work to do. Uh but generally, it seems like there's a lot of people excited about this technology and eager to actually put funds behind it.
34:14 Speaker 03 Okay, thank you so much.
34:16 Speaker 00 Yep.
34:17 Speaker 04 Hi, uh thank you so much. Um I have two questions, like one uh more broad and one more technical. So the technical one like is uh V L A's. Uh in my opinion, like at least to my understanding, are a a framework that a bit is that is a bit separate like from world modeling. And I wonder like how the two of them like will interplay among each other. And whether like you have actually planned like to somehow like use them together. Uh as I see right now, like V L A's as more of a policies uh that could actually benefit a lot from world modelings. And from a broader perspective, I wonder like which kind of infrastructure layers
34:58 Speaker 04 could be the most useful uh to work on, such as like experimentability, traceability, or uh safety in general, to deploy such models like in the real world.
35:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, great question. So um on the first point, we there's actually fairly natural ways to incorporate world model objectives into vision, language, action models. And um we've done some work where um instead of only predicting the next action, you predict some intermediate sub-goal image, uh like what should happen in the future in order to accomplish the task, uh and then predict an action from there. Uh and we've seen some kind of signs of life that seems to be quite promising. So I think there's ways to merge the uh merge the two paradigms. Uh at the same time, I think there's a lot of challenges that come up with world modeling. With regard to the ways in which, basically the data that you put into it, not necessarily being kind of reflective of the ways in which you're going to use it. You might train it on demonstration data of successful data of completing the task,
35:54 Speaker 00 and then evaluate it on, to try to actually use it to evaluate actions that are not optimally completing the task. And then the world model will hallucinate a video of completing the task successfully, even if the actions that you provided as input didn't, weren't actually going to successfully lead to a good outcome. So there's challenges there to overcome, and so it's not like, yeah, there's various challenges, but there's also ways to integrate it into the VLA paradigm. And then, could you remind me your second question?
36:23 Speaker 04 What are like the infrastructure layers, like you have the chance to work on in the shortest term to bring like the most improvements, let's say?
36:34 Speaker 00 To actually run these models on robots, you need, we have like a real-time system that needs to actually be hitting a certain frequency to actually like execute actions successfully. And if you have lag in that system and so forth, it introduces all sorts of challenges. And so thinking about fast inference and infrastructure for like, that's actually going to be on the robot, is a big part of what our software team does. And then also thinking about like large-scale machine learning infrastructure, training large models, adjusting large amounts of data. The data that we have is different from a lot of kind of typical data sets, because it's very multimodal in nature. It's kind of videos, actions, language segments, and various other components as well. So yeah, some interesting infrastructure problems, I think, both on the robot side
37:20 Speaker 00 and on the kind of model training side.
37:23 Speaker 04 Thank you so much.
37:25 Speaker 05 Hi, I'm Frederick, and I have got a question about model sizes in general. So I think what we're seeing right now is that in general, larger model sizes lead to better accuracy, for example, also in your experiments, or it's also what OpenAI and Anthropic and others are doing right now with their LLMs. However, there's also the approach of using a quite small model, and then outsourcing the world knowledge into a database of some sort with which the model can interact. What is your take on that? Do you think that's a valid approach? Or do you think encapsulating all the world knowledge inside of the model is better or works better?
38:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's an interesting question. So in my experience, working on like retrieval based systems,
38:08 Speaker 00 is that it actually is a little bit tricky to first figure out what should be offloaded versus actually done by the model. And second, sometimes the model will ignore the retrieved content and try to generate something itself. And it actually seems to be very quite tricky to get that technically to work exactly the way you want it. I think it's probably going to depend on the application and the use case in terms of how best to like, whether that might make sense. But in my experience, it ends up being quite tricky to figure out what the division of labor is. And even the like the model part of it will need to have some degree of intelligence in order to like actually make use of the retrieved information and so forth. So I think it's a really fascinating research problem,
38:50 Speaker 00 but it also needs like a lot of research to make that to make that work successfully.
38:56 Speaker 05 Thank you.
38:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
38:58 Speaker 06 Hi, Chelsea. My name is Charu Thomas. First off, really appreciate the talk. It was really fascinating and I've been a big fan of your work since meta learning.
39:08 Speaker 06 When you think about how software and hardware are going to continue to evolve, what are the biggest opportunities for builders today for your vision of physical intelligence?
39:19 Speaker 00 I mean, I think that, yeah, there's lots of different like opportunities to make things work a lot better and a lot of like open questions. I think kind of like what I was mentioning before, thinking about better ways of having infrastructure on like kind of the robot side. I think that there isn't a lot of like, there's some open source code for that sort of thing, but there's a lot of opportunities to make robot infrastructure better. And not a lot of people, I think, are working on that aspect of the problem. Also, lots of opportunities, like, I guess, one of the things I love about AI and computer science as a whole is there's a really big open source community. And I think that there's a ton of opportunity to actually like do open source work and contribute to like a broader community that's trying to like collect data,
40:04 Speaker 00 open source models, fix bugs on those models, fine tune those models, figure out new recipes for fine tuning those models. So, yeah, all sorts of questions also like on the research side, especially in the open source realm.
40:15 Speaker 06 Yeah, thank you.
40:17 Speaker 07 Hi Chelsea, I also, just like everyone else, am a big fan of all your work, so thank you for putting that all out. I've been reading through a lot of your group's work recently and particularly enjoyed reading Suraj's PhD thesis. It taught me a lot about scaling real-world robotics with data. And a question I have is, how do you think synthetic data will sort of scale for robotics in the future? As we've seen with LLMs, we've moved away from sort of, not moved away from pre-training, but moved away from human-collected data into more creating synthetic data and a lot of filtering and a lot of self-grading. So how do you think using generative synthetic data for creating environments or reward models will impact robotics?
41:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, I have many thoughts on this topic. I think that at the end of the day, there's going to be no replacement for real data, and so we're like, large amounts of real robot data is going to be a necessary component of any like, system that's going to work in a generalizable way. So we're going to need that. At the same time, I do think that there's tools for like simulation and synthetic data, especially to potentially play on the evaluation side. Because it's very tricky to actually, as you for example are generalizing to many environments, it's very tricky to actually evaluate how well that model generalizes not just in one new environment, but in 10 new environments. Because then you actually need to bring the robot to those 10 environments or construct 10 environments, whereas in simulation that gets a lot easier. And so I think, I'm really excited about kind of simulation and synthetic data for that use case.
41:46 Speaker 00 I should also mention that I think that the analog of synthetic data in language models is actually not necessarily simulation in robotics, but closer to something like reinforcement learning. I think that a lot of synthetic data is generated by the model that's actually trying to do the task, and then trying to kind of reason through different ways of doing the task. And I think that the analogy there is a robot that's trying to attempt the task and learn from its own attempts and get better from its own attempts. And that sort of online data from the model, I think, will also play a really critical role in post-training and something that we're working on quite a bit. And so yeah, that I think is like really important and really helpful.
42:20 Speaker 07 Thank you.
42:22 Speaker 00 Cool, I think we have time for one more question. Sorry, we won't be able to get to everyone. Yeah.
42:27 Speaker 08 Hi, it's super cool to see you as an MIT ICS alumni now working in a really cool robotics stuff and talking just about robotics and entrepreneurship. But I've been wondering how robotics research that involves hardware components plays out differently in academia versus industry? And are there typically more resources, fewer constraints, or broader applications in one setting over the other? And what kind of people or goals do you think might be better suited for each path?
42:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's an interesting question. I still love both startup and academic environments and industry environments. I think they all have various pros and cons. Certainly, I think that generally academic environments aren't quite as well resourced in terms of data collection throughput, eval throughput, and compute as startups and industry labs. But at the same time, I think that there's a lot of problems that you can solve without large amounts of resources that we need to figure out, like on the algorithm side. So I think that there's a lot of really interesting work to be done there. And then in industry and then startups, I think actually trying to do some of the research on these big models, scaling up data, seeing what things happen at large scales is really
43:38 Speaker 00 great to do there. Yeah, I think that there's a place for both. I also think that the gap isn't as large as often people make it seem. And oftentimes, people in industry environments kind of wish they had more compute. You kind of always wish that you had more resources. And sometimes, when you have a lot of resources, you don't actually think as carefully and as critically about what runs you're going to be doing and so forth. And you end up being sometimes more wasteful of compute than if you were more compute constrained. So there's also actually downsides to having more resources, in my experience.
44:09 Speaker 09 I'm really sorry. Can I just ask you one quick question on architecture? I know that the scaling laws have worked well for transformer-based architectures. And I was thinking, do you see currently limits in VLM-based architecture, which are kind of made for text tokens? Because they don't have modules for physical awareness. Yeah, and how do you deal with that?
44:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, so we tokenize the actions. And so I'd encourage you to take a look at the Fast Tokenizer paper that we put out as kind of a way to accomplish that. And yeah, we should wrap up there. Thanks, everyone. And yeah, I hope you enjoy the event.
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