Finn: Modern AI coding assistants build on general data, not just code
Chelsea Finn · Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything · Y Combinator · Jul 22, 2025 · at 1:25
Chelsea Finn, co-founder of Physical Intelligence, contrasts specialized AI development with broad foundation model pre-training.
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“For example, if you want to build a coding assistant, you don't nowadays develop something specifically for coding, but you develop and you build on models that were trained on large amounts of data, not just on code.”
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“And we think that this sort of generalist model may work better and be easier to use than purpose-built models, just like we've seen in the development of foundation, foundation models for language and other applications.”
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“And so I think the lesson here is that scale is necessary for developing these models that can generalize in open world conditions, but they're subordinate to actually solving the problem. So you need scale, but it's not sufficient for the entire problem.”
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Finn: Frontier models struggle with visual understanding for robotics
“In general, we found that these frontier models generally struggle with visual understanding as it pertains to robotics. Which makes sense because in general, these models aren't kind of really targeting, ah, many physical applications and have very little dat…”
Chelsea Finn: Real robot data cannot be replaced by synthetic data
“I think that at the end of the day, there's going to be no replacement for real data. And so we're like large amounts of real robot data. It's going to be a necessary component of any like system that's going to work in a generalizable way.”