#38 Karol Hausman & Kevin Black: Building A Brain For Any Robot | AI Eating The Physical World

About this episode

I sit down with Karol Hausman and Kevin Black of Physical Intelligence (Pi) to unpack how they are building a general-purpose robot brain so any robot can perform any task, anywhere. We talk about the convergence of AI, robotics, and automation and what it will take to give machines true physical intelligence.

• How Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) differ from other AI models.
• The "Taylor Swift" moment that showed the capabilities of VLAs
• Pi's strategy for open-sourcing models to accelerate research and development.
• The technical advancements in their Pi 0.5 model and "open world" generalization.
• The challenges of inference speed and context length
• Importance of low cost hardware
• Opportunities for non-technical founders in robotics

If you're interested in the future of general-purpose robots, physical AI, or the future of labor, then give this episode a listen/watch.

#robots #ai #decentralization

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

01:06 Vision-Language-Action Model (VLA) vs Vision-Language Model (VLM)

04:42 "Taylor Swift" Pivotal Moment In Robotics

07:40 Training Robots With Natural Language Prompts

09:50 Pi's "Action Expert" Architecture

13:02 Pi’s Open Source Strategy

16:11 Perspectives On Building Hardware

22:12 Creating An Ecosystem For Physical Intelligence

24:51 Pi 0.5 Model And Open World Generalization

32:18 Hitting Diminishing Returns On Task-Specific Data

35:16 Tackling Real-Time Inference Speed in Robotics

38:33 Improving Context Length

44:53 Importance of In-House Data Collection

47:41 Opportunities For Service Providers In Robotics

48:28 The Role of Hardware in Robotics

50:00 Dealing with Edge Cases And Data Diversity

52:22 Founding Story Of Pi

55:28 Kevin’s Journey To Pi

58:49 Opportunities For Non-Technical Founders In Robotics

01:01:03 Exploring Areas For Early Deployment

01:01:44 Rapid Fire Questions on Robotics

01:01:56 One Assumption AI Researchers Get Wrong

01:06:49 Closing

Follow Jordan on X: https://x.com/jrwolfe

Links to Karol & Kevin’s Work:

• Pi (Physical Intelligence) Website – https://www.physicalintelligence.company/

• E-mail - [email protected]

• Follow Pi on X - https://x.com/Physical_int

• Kevin’s website - https://kevin.black/

• Follow Kevin on X - https://x.com/kvablack

• Karol’s website - https://karolhausman.github.io/

• Follow Karol on X - https://x.com/hausman_k

Key Influences and Resources Mentioned:

Sergey Levine’s Substack - https://sergeylevine.substack.com/

Subscribe & Follow:

• Join the Substack – https://goingdirect.substack.com/subscribe
• Listen on Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/6w1ePcNc7D1HUMkTkSRCz4?si=5551da215c4f4c63 
• Listen on Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/going-direct-conversations/id1800505663

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