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Reporting and discussion about Robots & Autonomy, with links to the original sources.
Keerthana Gopalakrishnan of Google DeepMind said robot training will probably blend teleoperation, sensor-equipped handheld rigs and human video, each trading scale for precision. On world models, she said the jury is still out.
Google DeepMind's Keerthana Gopalakrishnan said humanoid sprint records show locomotion that trains well in simulation. In her view, contact-heavy hand work is the real frontier, where hands have improved but still need reliability and lower cost.
Keerthana Gopalakrishnan of Google DeepMind says robot models are at a GPT-2 stage. In her view, a GPT-3 moment needs few-shot teaching to work across many tasks and one brain to run reliably on a new robot body, a test language models never faced.
Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, who leads Gemini Robotics research at Google DeepMind, explained how a reasoning model open to developers directs an action model limited to testers, and where she says failures arise.
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey argues that weapons must carry their own AI because links to a central controller can be jammed, hacked or attacked. He says people still choose where weapons operate and what they look for.
Palmer Luckey argues humanoid robots may suit civilian work, but defense needs specialized machines. He says Anduril would rather use other companies' humanoids, for example to run costly legacy radars.
Anduril won $2.2 million in XPRIZE's wildfire contest, including a $1 million detection bonus, after controlled tests in Alaska. Founder Palmer Luckey says the system must also reject decoys and send equipment that can reach a fire in time.
In one DrivingBench session, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra drove a real Corolla through a cone course on its second try. Alexander Wissner-Gross said specialist robotics models are unnecessary; Dave Blundin questioned reliability and compute cost.
Figure says its Helix 2.5 robot did chores in 30 unseen homes, with human-video pretraining lifting full-task success to 56% from 9%, though each chore was trained elsewhere. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said he wouldn't want one at home.
Musk wants to sell Tesla's two-seat Cybercab for about $30,000 so owners can run small robotaxi fleets, a Moonshots panel said; Tesla publishes no price and offers rides only in limited parts of Austin.
Peter Diamandis said a Unitree humanoid built in three months ran 12.66 m/s, above Bolt's 12.4. Salim Ismail urged non-human designs, Alexander Wissner-Gross bet on general-purpose bodies, and Emad Mostaque predicted street limits on extreme robots.
Uber is investing in Zipline and adding its drones to Uber Eats, targeting one million deliveries a day by end-2029. Moonshots panelists saw it as a test of Uber aggregating demand while suppliers, who could sell direct, own the robots.