Vuong: PI's laundry demo successfully folded unseen garments zero-shot
Quan Vuong · The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here · Y Combinator · Apr 16, 2026 · at 16:46
Quan Vuong, co-founder of Physical Intelligence, explains a video demo of a robot autonomously folding laundry in a public San Francisco laundromat.
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“No two items of clothing here are the same, and these are also unseen. You know, these are not, like, clothing items that are seen in the training data.”
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“Almost all of the robot evaluation that we run at Pi today, including the really Complicated demo that we have shown making coffee, folding laundry, mobile robots navigating around. The model actually hosted in the cloud.”
Vuong: PI integrated with robot startups without ever inspecting their hardware
“And the, one other interesting thing about our collaboration with Weave and Ultra is one, I've never seen their robot in person. Two is I have very little idea about how their robot actually works. And that's a very intentional choice. I want to stay away from…”
Vuong: Reactive AI models eliminate the need for expensive, high-precision hardware
“You don't need a incredibly expensive robot that is capable of very precise motion today to be able to do this task. And the reason why is this model really reactive? And so they can compensate for some of the inaccuracy in the actual robot movement”
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“This only works for simple cases today, and the reason why that's the case is because I think it's pretty fundamental limitation of the model that we have today, which is that they are not at the core model that take action in the world and see the consequence…”