The $1/Hour Worker: Four Robotics CEOs on Humanoids at Home, China's Threat, and the End of Dangerous Jobs
(0:00) Intro: Humanoids, Robots, & AI+
(0:57) ANYbotics' Dr. Péter Fankhauser: Why ANYbotics Bet the Company on Four-Legged Robot Dogs, Not Humanoids
(13:18) Dr. Péter Fankhauser: China's Armed Robot Dogs Are "Stupid and Risky" — Inside the Terminator Debate
(15:01) NEO's Bernt Børnich: Neo Ships in 2026 and Becomes an Open Robot Platform
(22:18) Bernt Børnich: Robots Building Robots in Just 3 Years — "Hard Takeoff"
(33:45) Boston Dynamics' Amanda McMaster: Spot Is Now the Most Deployed Robot on Earth — Atlas is the Most Capable
(42:36) Amanda McMaster: Chinese Robotics Security Risks
(47:14) Agility Robotics' Jonathan Hurst: Why "This Time Is Different" for Humanoids After 100 Years of False Starts
(58:45) Jonathan Hurst: When Do Robots Outnumber Humans on the Factory Floor?
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Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch
Eric Jang walks through how to build AlphaGo from scratch, but with modern AI tools.
Sometimes you understand the future better by stepping backward. AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play. You have to go back to 2017 to get insight into how the more general AIs of the future might learn.
Once he explained how AlphaGo works, it gave us the context to have a discussion about how RL works in LLMs and how it could work better – naive policy gradient RL has to figure out which of the 100k+ tokens in your trajectory actually got you the right answer, while AlphaGo’s MCTS suggests a strictly better action every single move, giving you a training target that sidesteps the credit assignment problem. The way humans learn is surely closer to the second.
Eric also kickstarted an Autoresearch loop on his project. And it was very interesting to discuss which parts of AI research LLMs can already automate pretty well (implementing and running experiments, optimizing hyperparameters) and which they still struggle with (choosing the right question to investigate next, escaping research dead ends). Informative to all the recent discussion about when we should expect an intelligence explosion, and what it would look like from the inside.
Watch on YouTube. Read the transcript.
And check out the flashcards I wrote to retain the insights.
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* Cursor‘s agent SDK let me build a pipeline to generate flashcards for this episode. For each card, I had an agent read the transcript, ingest blackboard screenshots, generate an SVG visual, and run everything through a critic. A durable agent is much better at this kind of work than a chain of LLM calls, and Cursor’s SDK made it easy. Check out the cards at flashcards.dwarkesh.com and get started with the SDK at cursor.com/dwarkesh
* Jane Street gave me a real deep-dive tour of one of their datacenters. I got to ask a bunch of questions to Ron Minsky, who co-leads Jane Street’s tech group, and Dan Pontecorvo, who runs Jane Street’s physical engineering team. They were willing to literally pull up the floorboards and take out racks to explain how everything works. Check out the full tour at janestreet.com/dwarkesh
Timestamps
(00:00:00) – Basics of Go
(00:08:17) – Monte Carlo Tree Search
(00:32:04) – What the neural network does
(01:00:33) – Self-play
(01:25:38) – Alternative RL approaches
(01:45:47) – Why doesn't MCTS work for LLMs
(02:01:09) – Off-policy training
(02:12:02) – RL is even more information inefficient than you thought
(02:22:16) – Automated AI researchers
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We Met NEO, the Viral Humanoid Robot + HatGPT
This week, we’re joined by Bernt Bornich, chief executive of 1X. We talked with him about NEO, his company’s new humanoid robot, which has the internet buzzing. Then we meet NEO itself, and compare notes on the experience. Finally, we close the week with a roundup of tech news headlines: It’s time for some HatGPT.
Guests:
Bernt Bornich, chief executive of 1X
Additional Reading:
I Tried the Robot That’s Coming to Live With You. It’s Still Part Human.
Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots
There Are More Robots Working in China Than the Rest of the World Combined
Trump Pardons Founder of the Crypto Exchange Binance
For Podcasters, a Voice Clone Is a Double-Edged Sword
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The Future of Humanoid Robots With 1X's Bernt Bornich - Ep. 259
Bernt Børnich, founder and CEO of 1X Technologies, shares his vision for the future of humanoid robotics. Hear how the company is building fully autonomous robots that can learn and adapt in real-world environments.
Learn more at ai-podcast.nvidia.com
Meet NEO, your robot butler in training | Bernt Børnich
What if doing your chores were as easy as flipping a switch? In this talk and live demo, roboticist and founder of 1X Bernt Børnich introduces NEO, a humanoid robot designed to help you out around the house. Watch as NEO shows off its ability to vacuum, water plants and keep you company, while Børnich tells the story of its development — and shares a vision for robot helpers that could free up your time to focus on what truly matters.
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