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

02:11 Vision-Language-Action Model (VLA) vs Vision-Language Model (VLM)

05:47 "Taylor Swift" Pivotal Moment In Robotics

08:45 Training Robots With Natural Language Prompts

10:55 Pi's "Action Expert" Architecture

14:07 Pi’s Open Source Strategy

17:16 Perspectives On Building Hardware

23:17 Creating An Ecosystem For Physical Intelligence

25:56 Pi 0.5 Model And Open World Generalization

33:23 Hitting Diminishing Returns On Task-Specific Data

36:21 Tackling Real-Time Inference Speed in Robotics

39:38 Improving Context Length

45:58 Importance of In-House Data Collection

48:46 Opportunities For Service Providers In Robotics

49:33 The Role of Hardware in Robotics

51:05 Dealing with Edge Cases And Data Diversity

53:27 Founding Story Of Pi

56:33 Kevin’s Journey To Pi

59:54 Opportunities For Non-Technical Founders In Robotics

01:02:08 Exploring Areas For Early Deployment

01:02:49 Rapid Fire Questions on Robotics

01:03:01 One Assumption AI Researchers Get Wrong

01:07:54 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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