Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine
Dwarkesh Podcast
Sep 12
Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine
Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

Dwarkesh Podcast
Sep 12
Shownote
Shownote
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 ent...
Highlights
Highlights
In this episode, Dwarkesh Patel sits down with Sergey Levine, a leading robotics researcher and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, to explore the future of autonomous robots and their potential to transform everyday life. Levine outlines a future where robots can manage household tasks with minimal supervision, driven by a self-improvement cycle similar to the evolution of large language models. The conversation delves into the technical and practical challenges that must be overcome to scale robotic capabilities, from data collection to hardware development, while offering an optimistic outlook for the next decade.
Chapters
Chapters
Timeline to widely deployed autonomous robots
00:00Why robotics will scale faster than self-driving cars
22:12How vision-language-action models work
32:15Improvements needed for brainlike efficiency
50:26Learning from simulation
1:02:48How much will robots speed up AI buildouts?
1:14:08If hardware’s the bottleneck, does China win by default?
1:22:54Transcript
Transcript
Dwarkesh Patel: Today, I'm chatting with Sergey Levine, who is a co-founder of Physical Intelligence, which is a robotics company focused on foundation models, and also a professor at UC Berkeley, and just generally, one of the world's leading researchers ...