YouSaid · the spoken record

Sergey Levine

lines on the record: 110
first: 2025-09-12
most recent: 2025-09-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I don't think there's like a profound reason why robotics is that different, but there are a few small differences that I think make things a little bit more manageable. So especially if you have a robot that's doing something in cooperation with people, whether it's a person that's supervising it or directing it, there are very natural sources of supervision. And there's a big incentive for the person to provide the assistance that will make things succeed There are a lot of dynamics where you can make mistakes and recover from those mistakes and then reflect back on what happened and avoid that mistake in the future.”
2025-09-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think that's like a profoundly impossible problem. It's just something where the details get pretty gnarly and challenges with algorithms and stability become pretty complex. So it's something that's taken a while for the community collectively to get their hands around.”
2025-09-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's actually very close to working, and I am 100% certain that many organizations are working on exactly this. In fact, arguably there is already a flywheel in the sense that Not an automated flywheel, but a human-the loop flywheel where everybody who's deploying an LLM is, of course, going to look at what it's doing and it's going to use that to then modify its behavior. It's complex because it comes back to this question of representations and figuring out the right way to derive supervision signals and ground those supervision signals in the behavior of the system so that it actually improves on what you want.”
2025-09-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It means that there is a robot that does a thing that you actually care about, that you want done, and it does so competently enough to like... Actually, do it for real, for real people that want it done.”
2025-09-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that could be very soon. And I think there are some decisions to be made. Like the trade-off there is the more narrow you scope the thing, the earlier you can get it out into the real world. But soon as in this is something we're already exploring, we're already trying to figure out what are the real things this thing can do that could allow us to start spinning the flying wheel. But I think in terms of stuff that you would actually care about that you would want to see, so I don't know, but I think that single digit years is very realistic. I'm really hoping it'll be more like one or two before something is actually out there, but it's hard to say.”
2025-09-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“75. I think it's something where it's not going to be a case where we develop everything in the laboratory and then it's done and then come 20, 30 something, you get a robot in a box. I think it'll be the same as what we've seen with AI assistance, that once we reach some basic level of competence where the robot is delivering something useful, it'll go out there in the world. The cool thing is that once it's out there in the world, they can collect experience and leverage that experience to get better. So to me, what I tend to think about a lot in terms of timelines is not the date when it will be done, but the date when the flywheel starts, basically.”
2025-09-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the prompt, and then the robot should go and do this for six months, a year. Like, that's the duration of the task. So it's, it's, it' Ultimately, if this stuff is successful, it should be a lot bigger. And it should have that ability to learn continuously. It should have the understanding of the physical world, the common sense, the ability to go in and pull in more information if it needs it. Like if I ask you, like, hey, tonight, can you make me this type of salad? It's okay, you should figure out what that entails, like, look it up, go and buy the ingredients. So there's a lot that goes into this. It requires common sense. It requires understanding that there are certain edge cases that you need to handle intelligently, cases where you need to think harder. It requires the ability to improve continuously. It requires understanding safety being reliable at the right time, being able to fix your mistakes when you do make those mistakes. So there's a lot more that goes into this.”
2025-09-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But from there, there are a number of really major challenges, and I think that sometimes when results get abstracted to the level of like a three-minute video, someone can look at this video, it's like, oh, that's cool, that's what they're doing. But it's not. It's a very simple and basic version of what I think is to come. What you really want from a robot is not to tell it, hey, please fold my t-shirt. What you want from a robot is to tell it, like, hey robot, like you're now doing all sorts of home tasks for me. I like to have dinner made at 6 p.m. I wake up and go to work at 7 a.m. I like to do my laundry on Saturday, so make sure that's ready, this and this and this. And by the way, check in with me like every Monday to see what I want you to pick up when you do the shopping.”
2025-09-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are a few things that we need to get right. I mean, dexterity obviously is one of them, and in the beginning we really wanted to make sure that we understand whether the methods that we're developing have the ability to tackle the kind of intricate tasks that people can do. As you mentioned, folding a box. Folding different articles of laundry, cleaning up a table, making a coffee, that sort of thing. And that's good. That works. I think that the results we've been able to show are pretty cool, but again, the end goal of this is not to fold a nice t-shirt. The end goal is to just confirm our initial hypothesis that the basics are kind of solid.”
2025-09-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So physical intelligence aims to build robotic foundation models, and that basically means general purpose models that could, in principle, control any robot to perform any task. We care about this because we see this as a very fundamental aspect of the AI problem. The robot is essentially encompassing all AI technology. So if you can get a robot that's truly general, then you can do hopefully a large chunk of what people can do. And where we're at right now is, I think we've kind of gotten to the point where we've built out a lot of the basics. And I think those basics actually are pretty cool. They work pretty well. We can get a robot that will fold laundry and that will go into a new home and try to clean up the kitchen. But in my mind, what we're doing at physical intelligence right now is really the very, very early beginning. It's just like putting in place the basic building blocks on top of which we can then tackle all these like really tough problems.”
2025-09-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source