Finn: Industrial automation data lacks behavioral diversity for general robotics
Chelsea Finn · Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything · Y Combinator · Jul 22, 2025 · at 2:19
Chelsea Finn, Stanford professor and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, explains why scaling robotics data purely via repetitive industrial automation fails to produce generalizable models.
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“So for example, we might look at data from industrial automation and you get tons and tons of data of robots doing tasks over and over again like this, but the sort of data isn't going to allow robots to go into disaster zones or to make a sandwich or to bag groceries. And so this massive scale doesn't have the diversity of behaviors that we need in order to solve this general problem.”
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