Sergey Levine, co-founder of Physical Intelligence and UC Berkeley professor, explains how robotics models can improve generalization on long-horizon tasks via semantic coaching instead of raw teleoperation data.
“So what that means is that the bottleneck had actually shifted from the lowest level, meaning the robot's ability to physically do the task, to this, like, middle level, where now the system is more bottlenecked by its ability to interpret the scene and select the correct next step, which can be supervised with language.”
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More from Sergey Levine
Opinion
Levine: General Robotics Models May Ultimately Be Easier Than Narrow Ones
“And part of the thesis of this company is that we believe that doing it at the full level of generality might actually in the long run be easier than trying to special case very specific narrow application domains.”
Sergey LevineMar 31, 2026▶ 1:38World's Top Researcher on AI, LLMs, and Robot Intelligence · Invest Like The Best
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Levine: Multi-robot data will enable foundational physical models for rapid deployment
“So if we can draw on data from many sources, many applications, many robots, then we can have a model that has a physical understanding, and it'll be much, much easier to put new applications on top of that platform.”
Sergey LevineMar 31, 2026▶ 3:52World's Top Researcher on AI, LLMs, and Robot Intelligence · Invest Like The Best
Opinion
Levine: Future Robots Won't Just Be Humanoid 'Metal People'
“And I think, you know, we, sometimes we think that, like, robots are going to be, like, one thing. Like, it's just like, you know, there's people, and now we're going to make, like, metal people, and that'll be, like, robots. But I don't think that's how it's …”
Sergey LevineMar 31, 2026▶ 6:41World's Top Researcher on AI, LLMs, and Robot Intelligence · Invest Like The Best
PredictionOpen · timeframe Mar 2031
Levine: Robotic foundation models will adapt across diverse physical form factors
“And I think that in the future we'll have A robotic foundation model, which can then be adapted to all sorts of applications, and they might really run the gamut from like, you know, like bulldozers or something, to humanoids, to robotic arms like this thing, …”
Sergey LevineMar 31, 2026▶ 8:17World's Top Researcher on AI, LLMs, and Robot Intelligence · Invest Like The Best
Insight
Levine: Chain-of-thought reasoning allows robots to handle edge cases
“So the way you get common sense is by essentially using chain of thought. So the robot enters a scene and instead of directly starting to move, it thinks about what it was asked to do. So if it was told to clean up the kitchen, looks at the scene and says, lik…”
Sergey LevineMar 31, 2026▶ 17:52World's Top Researcher on AI, LLMs, and Robot Intelligence · Invest Like The Best
Insight
Levine: Effective AI Learning Methods Compensate for Deficient Hardware Sensing
“A good learning method can actually like compensate for deficient sensing fairly well.”
Sergey LevineMar 31, 2026▶ 21:09World's Top Researcher on AI, LLMs, and Robot Intelligence · Invest Like The Best
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