Chelsea Finn, co-founder of Physical Intelligence and Stanford professor, explains the fundamental deployment difference between digital AI and physical robotics.
“Typically in machine learning, a lot of the successful applications of like recommender systems, language models like image detection, a lot of the consumers of that Of the model outputs are actually humans who could actually check it, and the humans are good at the thing. A lot of the very natural applications of robots is actually the robot doing something autonomously on its own, where it's not like a human consuming the commanded arm position, for example, and then checking it and then validating it and so forth.”
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More from Chelsea Finn
Opinion
Finn: Humanoids are overrated because collecting teleoperation data is too difficult
“On the other hand, I think that they're a little overrated, and one way it kind of to practically look at it is, I think that we're generally fairly bottlenecked on data right now, and some people argue that with humanoids, you can maybe collect data more easi…”
Chelsea FinnMar 20, 2025▶ 15:05No Priors Ep. 107 | With Physical Intelligence Co-Founder Chelsea Finn
AssertionSupported
Finn: Robot training data transfers across different physical hardware embodiments
“We've seen a lot of evidence that you could actually transfer a lot of rich information across these different embodiments and allows you to use data. And also if you iterate on your robot platform, you don't have to throw all your data away.”
Chelsea FinnMar 20, 2025▶ 4:21No Priors Ep. 107 | With Physical Intelligence Co-Founder Chelsea Finn
Opinion
Finn: Biggest risk in generalist robotics is technical failure, not competition
“The last thing that I'll mention is that I think the biggest risk with this bet is that it won't work. Like, I'm not really worried about competitors. I'm more worried that no one will solve the problem.”
Chelsea FinnMar 20, 2025▶ 11:45No Priors Ep. 107 | With Physical Intelligence Co-Founder Chelsea Finn
Insight
Finn: Wrist-mounted RGB cameras capture much of what tactile sensors provide
“And we found that actually that mounting RGB cameras to the wrists ends up being very, very helpful and probably giving you a lot of the same information that tactile sensors can give you.”
Chelsea FinnMar 20, 2025▶ 23:31No Priors Ep. 107 | With Physical Intelligence Co-Founder Chelsea Finn
Insight
Finn: Pre-trained VLMs let robots perform tasks with unseen internet concepts
“We had a research result
a couple years ago where we showed that if you leverage vision language models, then you could actually get the robot to do tasks that require concepts that were never in the robot's training data, but were in the internet.”
Chelsea FinnMar 20, 2025▶ 7:05No Priors Ep. 107 | With Physical Intelligence Co-Founder Chelsea Finn
Insight
Finn: Embodied AI and motor control are underrated compared to language models
“I feel like actually people underestimate how much intelligence goes into motor control. Many, many years of evolution is what led to us being able to use our hands the way that we do. And there are many animals that they can't do it even though they had so mu…”
Chelsea FinnMar 20, 2025▶ 16:51No Priors Ep. 107 | With Physical Intelligence Co-Founder Chelsea Finn
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