Digitized | Spotlight
00:19:23 · Winnie, Michael Cho
[00:19:23] S1: Yeah. No. I think you also run a podcast with... Where you kind of talk a lot about and interview some of these top researchers, correct, in robotics. What are some, like, exciting frontier things? I guess a lot of what you're doing is already quite frontier, but, like, what are some interesting research pathways or, you know, exciting things that you guys have been discussing lately that you can share? [00:19:46] S2: Yeah. I mean... So... Yeah. Me me and this guy, Chris Paxton, shout out to Chris. He... He's a real expert. He himself is a top researcher. So I I feel very privileged to do the podcast with him. I think both of us, I mean it's, I mean you can tell me I'm very geeky, read like research papers for years and people are going to sleep so I've been doing it for ages. [00:20:07] S1: I mean you spent COVID building robots so.
00:20:10 · Michael Cho
[00:20:10] S2: Yeah yeah yeah so that was my COVID. Yeah so yeah there are I think there are some clear trends I would say because like we do this like once or twice a week now there's just so many cool papers coming out But broadly speaking, like, I I can name a few big trends. Like, for... So for example, models that are trained using ecocentric videos. This is... I I I I kinda feel that the last maybe half a year, there was a big trend. There's a lot more papers coming out partially because of some of these, like, work that's done especially by Meta. They have this smart glasses called ARIA. So that has spun off a bunch of research. And to be honest, EcoCentric video had been looked at by the computervisioncom... Community for, like, ages, But I thought nothing really moved until quite recently, and now there's a huge amount of interest. So something has changed, I think, technology that that allows researchers to pick a lot... To do a lot more with ecocentric video. So I think that's one big one. Of course, all the humanoids, they are very, very... Like, advancing very, very quickly. You know, a year plus ago, they can barely walk. Now they are, like, kicking around, like, you know, doing crazy dance, and and and so, I think there are a lot of very cool papers coming that's specific to humanoid as well. Some of the other stuff also more fundamental research like I think reinforcement learning, it's traditionally doesn't really work for robotics. Know? So, like, for example, AlphaGo is is basically all RL, but but because you you can always, you know, like, we can... You can restart the game. It's all in simulation. Right? And so whereas in the robot in the real world if you do some rl like on policy rl online rl and then basically if robots fail you can't you can't respawn yeah so that's why it's never quite worked but I'm starting to see people pushing a boundary on what you can do and I think that's a very big piece of the puzzle as well that needs to be solved. It's not soft but a lot of cool works coming out. I just saw yesterday like something from physical intelligence using IRL to a great extent.
00:22:24 · Michael Cho, Winnie
So, and by definition, I mean by extension there are these like in context learning, things like that that push, allow the robots to learn a lot more when they're being deployed instead of just the current paradigm which is just calling a huge amount of data first and then you train a model, then you deploy and then you see how it feels, then you train a huge model again, which is super inefficient. That's not how animals and humans do it, We just learn as we go, [00:22:54] S1: iterate as we go, [00:22:55] S2: and then we just accumulate. Exactly, so the robots, most of the, exactly, so I think these are cool research trends and we have a couple of many authors that cover these different things, yeah. So these are some of big trends, I would say. [00:23:10] S1: Love that. Earlier, you mentioned how humanoids are getting a bit better. I am curious because I know you guys also incubated and spun off this, like, humanoid fighting entertainment franchise. And tell me more about that. Like, I feel like there's, like, a lot of sold out shows. There's a lot of coverage on that. What led you to launch Yep. UFB, I believe it's what's called, and kind of, like, how does that tie to BitRobot?
00:23:35 · Amanda
[00:23:35] S0: So for robots incubated UFB, it's a yeah, like you said, it's a humanoid fighting league. And yeah, they've had a bunch of shows in SF and LA sold out covered in New York Times, Ashley Vans, Washington Post. I think they had... Now they're in LA working with creators like Wiz Khalifa that are piloting the bots. So, yeah, they've gotten a lot of attention. I think, like, and I think Michael can talk about like his thesis around robotic gaming. But essentially like, if you think about what is the first use case for, for robots like humanoids, when they're not super, let's say like, reliable in doing like everyday tasks, it's entertainment. And so like, I know Michael views that the first big use case and like where most of the purchases of humanoids are going to go to is towards entertainment. And so how can you use entertainment to then create a flywheel for robotics R and D? So use the media and entertainment franchise to finance the bots and then use the bots when they're not fighting for a a subnet. In this case, something like humanoid navigation is is what we're exploring. So that's the concept. I know, like, Michael's the kind of the visionary though behind UFB, so I don't know if you wanna add.
00:24:53 · Michael Cho, Winnie, Amanda
[00:24:53] S2: Well, I mean, it is the same kind of learning I got from the Cyborg Robot. You know, it's a game, but I think you can always do that, but you know, if you can create a robotic entertainment thing and oftentimes there's some overlap with something that could be useful for research. It doesn't happen all the time, but I think if it happens then I think we should lean into it. But it's a whole different endeavor on its own. So Zelie and Vitale, the two co founders there, they're they're leading it. So it it has to be treated at the serious, like entertainment business, media business kind of thing. And so they're they're running that. Yeah. [00:25:35] S1: And rumor has it that they are going to Solana Breakpoint in The Middle East. Is that correct? That's right. Yeah. Anything you can share that's exciting about that? [00:25:47] S0: Over 20 humanoids, will be going to Etihad Arena where Breakpoint is being hosted. I think the first robot fight in The Middle East and three days of battles, you'll be seeing your favorite Solana ecosystem founders, investors, KOLs piloting the bots. So yeah, come by. [00:26:06] S1: It's like karate combat, you know, how they used to take over some of these conferences, but now it's humanoids fought by the same KOLs. Yeah. Some of the... You guys can bring back the same fighters, but maybe they'd be better in a humanoid form. Cool. Yeah. Let's close out with some fun rapid fire questions. Michael and Amanda, maybe we can start with one each. But what is your favorite robotics movie or fictional rock... Robot character?
00:26:06 · Winnie, Michael Cho, Amanda
[00:26:06] S1: It's like karate combat, you know, how they used to take over some of these conferences, but now it's humanoids fought by the same KOLs. Yeah. Some of the... You guys can bring back the same fighters, but maybe they'd be better in a humanoid form. Cool. Yeah. Let's close out with some fun rapid fire questions. Michael and Amanda, maybe we can start with one each. But what is your favorite robotics movie or fictional rock... Robot character? [00:26:36] S2: Oh, gosh. Oh man. I'm just gonna say like Gundam, you know, have so many Gundam in my house. [00:26:48] S1: I have so many Gundams at my house because my husband just keeps like building these, so we have a whole army of them. And I'm like, do we need another one? [00:26:56] S2: Yeah. Yeah. Gundam. I'm a huge fan of Gundam. [00:27:00] S0: I love love [00:27:02] S1: Amanda? I would say... [00:27:04] S0: So I I really enjoyed watching Sunny. Yeah. Showing... Yeah. Seeing the the home bot. Hopefully, they won't go rogue, the ones that are in the next year. Yeah. [00:27:16] S2: That's a good show too. Yeah. Sunny. Yep. [00:27:18] S1: Mhmm. What's the under... Underrated robotics project or, like, research paper or something that you guys are following that are excited about?