Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

Sergey Levine, one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, thinks we’re on the cusp of a “self-improvement flywheel” for general-purpose robots. His median estimate for when robots will be able to run households entirely autonomously? 2030. If Sergey’s right, the world 5 years from now will be an insanely different place than it is today. This conversation focuses on understanding how we get there: we dive into foundation models for robotics, and how we scale both the data and the hardware necessary to enable a full-blown robotics explosion. Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sponsors * Labelbox provides high-quality robotics training data across a wide range of platforms and tasks. From simple object handling to complex workflows, Labelbox can get you the data you need to scale your robotics research. Learn more at labelbox.com/dwarkesh * Hudson River Trading uses cutting-edge ML and terabytes of historical market data to predict future prices. I got to try my hand at this fascinating prediction problem with help from one of HRT’s senior researchers. If you’re curious about how it all works, go to hudson-trading.com/dwarkesh * Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (aka nano banana) isn’t just for generating fun images — it’s also a powerful tool for restoring old photos and digitizing documents. Test it yourself in the Gemini App or in Google’s AI Studio: ai.studio/banana To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise. Timestamps (00:00:00) – Timeline to widely deployed autonomous robots (00:22:12) – Why robotics will scale faster than self-driving cars (00:32:15) – How vision-language-action models work (00:50:26) – Improvements needed for brainlike efficiency (01:02:48) – Learning from simulation (01:14:08) – How much will robots speed up AI buildouts? (01:22:54) – If hardware’s the bottleneck, does China win by default? Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe