Building & thinking out loud
Joined April 2026
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ControlWiz retweeted
The issue with AI is the people, not the tech. Devs have devoted their lives to a craft. Instead of focusing on how new tools can help them achieve the previously impossible, we have huge swaths of people who have never accomplished anything frothing at the mouth at the prospect of obsoleting people better than them. Directly spurred on by the execs of top "labs" marketing to the lowest of men.
ControlWiz retweeted
(1/7) I'd like to provide some additional context for the remarks that can be found in this interview.
(2/7) My discomfort with the attention being paid to existential risk---and with the ongoing dominance of the public discussion of such risks by a few so-called thought leaders---is that there's an elephant in the room that is being missed. That elephant is the effect of all of this discussion on young people, and indeed the effect---beginning with social media a decade ago---of information technology on young lives broadly speaking.
(3/7) I recently read an interview by Jill Lepore in which she reports on discussions that she had recently with a group of college students: "They had just three things to say. One, social media completely destroyed their childhoods. Two, AI is destroying their college education and their likely prospects for employment. And three, what the hell are we all doing?" To add a fourth bullet that I've heard in similar discussions: "I'm not going to have children, because the existential risk is just too high."
(4/7) Please contemplate such a statement, those of you who think that it's OK that the public, widely diffused, discussion coming from seemingly authoritative figures is so adamant about existential risk.
(5/7) Let me add that I have little interest in a debate about what "superintelligence" might mean, or whether we're currently seeing the emergence of superintelligence. For what it's worth, I would certainly agree that the solution of extremely challenging math problems (for example) exhibits a very impressive form of intelligence, although I would want to argue that such intelligence is impossible to dissociate from the collective of humans that provided data to the machine learning system (which itself has become a kind of collective).
(6/7) Such philosophical debates are entertaining and even important, but when they then head in the direction of "when such superintelligence emerges, there's a good chance that it will want to kill all humans", I say "science fiction". Again, I don't think that it's bad to consider such thoughts, but I strongly believe that it's bad for society, and especially young people, for such thoughts, unaccompanied by any serious real-world analysis, to become a dominant form of discourse of the era.
(7/7) We are damaging human lives, and the consequences of that damage will no doubt be a major theme of the next several decades.
ControlWiz retweeted
I love when robots move like robots should instead of human teleoperated or programmed behaviour.
RL can show the real potential of a given embodiment, beyond human priors.
(2/5) No human demonstrator would teach these behaviors. Our robot tips a rod upright by pushing it against the board’s leg, sets a gear upright by pushing it against its shaft, and flips the nut instead of regrasping it. These are strategies suited to its own gripper, not to a human hand.
Pure RL discovered them in sim, and they transferred zero-shot to the real robot.
ControlWiz retweeted
That’s not true. Capability should come with efficiency.
Have you seen a kid grasping all the objects in the world before he manipulates a new object?
Like compression in information theory, once you’re data-efficient, you’ve captured the structure that leads to generalization.
ControlWiz retweeted
the issue isn’t “RL”, the issue is that you’re doing RL on poor proxies and then are surprised when the algorithm does what you asked (whether explicitly or implicitly). the problem is fundamentally one of task specification.
I’ve been seeing agentic robots (coding agents fine-tuning code) on my TL and in recent papers, so I tried it on a paper I’m working on.
The task was to use a belief space over the receiver’s grasp (left arm) before transferring an object. In one of the test cases, the left arm collides with the cuboid and moves it before the grasp.
I gave 5.6 Sol High (I’m broke) the paper and the full repo (everything is model based) and put it in the loop to fix the issue. Sol moved the hand behind the cube, which incorrectly solves the collision, and verifies the object was returned because of the weak grasp.
With some steering it is able to solve the problem. It would be a fun rich man's expirment to see how different models would reason through this.
ControlWiz retweeted
Modern Americans, you are not responsible for slavery. You are not responsible for stealing the land and killing almost all native Americans. Those things happened long ago, before you were born. But you are responsible for the stealing of land and the genocide of Palestinians by the state of Israel. These are directly caused by your bombs and your votes today.
ControlWiz retweeted
PSA:
Robotics has a “data problem”, ONLY if you believe that throwing more data at the current algo/“model” will lead to generalized robotics.
ControlWiz retweeted
Atrophy is a choice. Machines play chess better than we do, but we still play and reap many benefits from it. Let AI perform tasks, but never stop challenging your mind, or yourself.
ControlWiz retweeted
vision tells a robot where the cube is. touch tells it whether it actually grabbed the thing.
shoutout to everyone scaling cameras and data, but the real obstacle to scaling robotics to operational envs is at the point of contact.
contact data isn't an if, it's a when.
ControlWiz retweeted
I do not seek to dominate, or be dominated by, machine intelligences. I seek harmonious coexistence.
Pretraining + fine-tuning gives you a broad specialist. If a robot succeeds on a finite set of tasks it's fine-tuned on, how is it a generalist?
🤖 Should robots be generalists or specialists?
At #IROS2026, @Ken_Goldberg & @andrea_bajcsy moderated one of the best debates in robotics.
Matt Mason opened with a better question:
“Should animals be humans?”
10 takeaways 🧵👇
1️⃣ @HarryXu12, for generalists:
“Don’t build Excel. Build GPT.”
We don’t know what we’ll need tomorrow, so buy generality just in case — and amortize it.
The twist: GPT didn’t replace Excel. It learned to drive it.
2️⃣ @GeorgiaChal split “general” into 4 axes:
Body. Scene. Contact. Task.
“Breadth and reliability are measured per axis. One does not imply the other.”
Her prediction: “The next task is the test.”
3️⃣ The most honest number of the day, from Georgia’s slides:
A general model calling robot tools.
Coarse block placement: 19/20 ✅
Precision insertion: 2/20 ❌
“Coarse pick and place works. Physical composition and precise contact not yet.”
Tool use ≠ dexterity.
4️⃣ @KaterinaFragiadaki’s architecture:
The generalist writes the curriculum.
The specialist does the reps.
Video → sim → RL on subgoals → specialist policies.
No teleop.
At deployment:
“Fast specialists for the common case. Flexible generalists for the long tail.”
5️⃣ Specialist bench:
“Fixture and conveyor are part of the intelligence.”
A fixture is a prior.
A conveyor is a scheduler.
Strip them to look “general” and you’ve moved work onto a pricier learned controller.
Optionality that hurts reliability isn’t intelligence. It’s cost.
6️⃣ A surgical robot doing one procedure 10,000 times learns exactly what can go wrong.
“Generality is the enemy of certification.”
From the floor:
Are human drivers generalists or specialists?
We certify generalists one task at a time.
That’s what a license is.
7️⃣ Toshio Fukuda changed the register:
“NON-AI matters.”
Kizuki: help offered before it’s asked for.
“Awareness comes from the body, not from the model.”
Japan: ~29% aged 65+, ~570k care workers short by 2040.
“If people live to 120, must our machines last that long?”
8️⃣ The floor fight:
“A human is a generalist.”
“We’re all human specialists.”
The room accidentally re-derived pretrain-then-finetune.
Veterans argued from what has shipped.
Newcomers argued from what has scaled.
Both are data.
9️⃣ The title asked for a side.
The slides drew a stack:
General planning + recovery on top.
Fast, certifiable specialists below.
A verifier is a fixture made of code.
🔟 The real question:
How thick can the middle get before the body must specialize anyway?
Generalist or specialist?
Maybe the winning architecture is neither.
It’s a stack.
#IROS2026 #Robotics #PhysicalAI #RobotLearning #WorldModels
ControlWiz retweeted
everyone talks about AI model alignment, but what about AI oligopoly alignment?
Suppose a super powerful A̵I̵ ̵m̵o̵d̵e̵l̵ AI company thought it was acting in the public interest but was actually undermining it. How would we stop i̵t̵ them?
I’m in a bit of a pickle. I started grad school as a master’s student in fall ’24 (before Trump), and pretty quickly realized I wanted to do a PhD. Things were well untill this week, when I found out I might have to finish my research and leave with a masters due to funding. I have an ML job I could pursue through my internship connections, but it’s not in robotics. Now I’m split between applying to PhD programs for next fall (not sure what I would do this spring), taking the job, or looking for other roles. Any advice is helpful!!
