Aug 27, 2026

AI models can now help run physical science experiments

The Model Hardware Standard (MHS) is a pioneering framework developed by Anthropic and HHMI Janelia to enable AI, specifically Claude, to safely and intelligently operate diverse scientific and manufacturing hardware. By abstracting device-specific communication, MHS dramatically accelerates scientific discovery, from automating complex microscopy tasks and real-time tracking to optimizing high-throughput drug screening, empowering researchers to focus on core scientific questions.

Aug 12, 2026

Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics

Chelsea Finn, co-founder of Physical Intelligence, discusses the path to building general-purpose robots that operate reliably in the real world. She details how advanced reinforcement learning with human intervention, coupled with multi-scale memory systems, significantly boosts robot autonomy and throughput. Finn argues that robotics is entering its "GPT era," moving from specialized models to powerful, out-of-the-box foundation models like their PIO7, which demonstrates strong compositional generalization across tasks, objects, and robot platforms, matching or exceeding specialist performance without fine-tuning. The talk also covers the unique challenges and opportunities in robotics data, model deployment, and career paths.

Aug 08, 2026

Why Robotics Still Isn't Solved - But Could Be Soon | YC Paper Club

This Paper Club delves into the current state of robotics, addressing roadblocks like the sim-to-real gap and embodiment drift. Speakers present advancements in multi-scale memory for long-horizon tasks, self-supervised embodied reasoning, zero-shot dexterous manipulation via massive simulation, and the economic imperative of teleoperation-first robotics companies, concluding with optimizations for efficient, real-time World Action Models.

Aug 03, 2026

Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work

Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov outlines seven crucial lessons from fifteen years of developing and scaling the Waymo Driver, the world's most advanced physical AI. He details the unique challenges of physical AI compared to digital, emphasizing the critical role of reliability, strategic technology choices, continuous innovation through foundation models, structure-augmented learning, high-fidelity simulation, AI flywheels, and robust evaluation frameworks to achieve superhuman safety and build trust in real-world autonomous systems.

Jul 28, 2026

The Next Frontier of AI Is Spatial Intelligence | Fei-Fei Li on a16z

Fei-Fei Li and Yunzhu Li discuss World Labs' acquisition of SceniX, focusing on building "spatial intelligence" and "large world models" to enable robots to understand and interact with the physical world. They elaborate on SceniX's "real-to-sim-to-real" pipeline, emphasizing how simulation, coupled with generative models like Marble, addresses the data bottleneck in robotics by providing consistent, scalable, and efficient training and evaluation environments. The conversation covers the role of counterfactual reasoning, the development of robotics foundation models, and the strategic focus on semi-structured environments for pragmatic, reliable robot deployment.

Jul 26, 2026

Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, shares critical lessons from NVIDIA's journey, emphasizing how early failures and a commitment to learning new technologies, like purchasing textbooks from Fry's to pivot the company, laid the groundwork for their success. He discusses NVIDIA's strategic vision, driven by accelerating algorithm domains and seeing AlexNet as a universal function approximator, which led to a reinvention of the computing stack. Huang also explores the future of AI with agents, the importance of fine-grained control, and the "Linux moment" of open-source AI, while also forecasting the rise of physical AI and job creation. He concludes with profound advice on resilience, systems thinking, and the "how hard can it be?" mindset for aspiring entrepreneurs in this unprecedented era of technological reset.