Speaker 1: Close your eyes for a second, seriously, just for a moment.
I want you to picture a scene. Okay, The lights
go down in a massive arena. The crowd goes dead, silent,
just holding their breath. A figure steps into the octagon.
It has the silhouette of a middleweight fighter, you know,
about one hundred and sixty five pounds, broad shoulders, looks
ready to throw.
Speaker 2: Down, right, a classic fighter's build.
Speaker 1: But then the spotlight hits it and you realize something
is off. This thing isn't sweating. It doesn't have skin,
it's built from aviation grade aluminum. It doesn't have muscles,
it has high torque actuators, and it definitely doesn't have fear.
Speaker 2: It just has a prime directive.
Speaker 1: What's that stay standing exactly? The bell rings and this
thing moves with a speed that just shouldn't be possible
for metal. It sounds like a scene from a sci
fi blockbuster.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, somebody'd watch it go Wow, the CGI's amazing, right.
Speaker 1: Cool graphics. But here's the thread we are pulling today.
This isn't a movie. It isn't CGI. It is happy
right now, A literal robot fight club has been announced
and the hardware involved is. Honestly, it's terrifyingly capable.
Speaker 2: It really is a moment where the boundary between special
effects and breaking news has completely dissolved. Yea, we aren't
looking at animation anymore. We're looking at raw physics executed
by autonomous systems.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads. I'm your host, And today we
are looking at a week where the world of robotics
didn't just take a step forward, it did a backflip,
learned to skateboard, and arguably started training for war.
Speaker 2: It has been a breathless few days. We're seeing a
convergence of durability, agility, and perhaps most unervingly, personality in
these machines.
Speaker 1: We have a massive stack of reports to get through today,
we're primarily drawing from the incredible reporting done by the
AI Nexus.
Speaker 2: They've been on top of this beat like no one.
Speaker 1: Else, they really have. They've been documenting this explosion of
humanoid robotics, capturing all the little details that make you
just stop and go wait. Is this actually real?
Speaker 2: And that is the question We're gonna be asking a
lot today. Is this real? And if it is, what
does it mean for the person listening to this right now?
Because it's one thing to watch a roll doun on YouTube, right,
it's another thing entirely to realize it's training to be
your coworker or your opponent.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's not waste any time. We have to start
with the violence. I mean, we just have to. I
need to talk about this combat league Engine AI, Engine AI.
They have audienced the world's first commercial humanoid free combat league.
Just saying those words together feels wild. Commercial humanoid combat.
Speaker 2: It is a significant pivot for the industry. Usually when
we talk about robots, we picture them, you know, carefully
navigating obstacle courses in a.
Speaker 1: Lab, or folding laundry really really.
Speaker 2: Slowly, or slowly folding a shirt while a grad student
holds their breath praying it doesn't drop it. Engine AI
has decided to go the route of the Roman Colisseum.
They launched this initiative just recently, and the premise is
effectively the UFC, but you replace the flesh and with
metal and code.
Speaker 1: And the hardware they're using is called the T eight hundred.
And I assume for anyone listening who loves eighty cinema,
that name is absolutely intentional.
Speaker 2: Oh completely, They are not hiding the terminator influence. They
are leaning into it hard.
Speaker 1: I'm embracing it.
Speaker 2: The whole philosophy behind the T eight hundred is to
mimic the structural proportions of an adult human perfectly that
one hundred and sixty five pounds sweet spot, but build
it with materials that allow for well superhuman resilience.
Speaker 1: So walk us through the league itself, because when I
first read about this, I just assumed it was like
engine AI fighting their own robots against each other, you know,
a tech demo where the outcome is kind of rigged.
Speaker 2: No, that would be boring, that's just marketing. This is
a sport, a real competition, real competition. They have established
a tiered tournament that's going to run all the way
through December. There are sixteen teams involved. And this is
the interesting part. On one side, you have these elite
university laboratories, the academics that people writing the recent search papers.
On the other side, you have hardcore robotic startups, the industry,
the people building the actual products. It's academia versus industry, ye,
battling it out in the ring.
Speaker 1: That's a great setup. But here's the part that really
made my jaw drop. Usually a robot like this costs
what I mean, it's got to be high six figures.
Speaker 2: Right, oh easily for a prototype of this caliber. With
these kinds of custom actuators and sensors, you are looking
at hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even touching a million,
depending on the supply chain in R and D.
Speaker 1: Right. But engine AI is giving the robots to these
teams for free. They are They are literally handing over
millions of dollars in hardware and just saying, here you go,
go program this thing to fight.
Speaker 2: It seems counterintuitive from a business standpoint, doesn't it. Why
give away your most advanced product just to watch it
get smashed to pieces?
Speaker 1: Exactly? I get nervous lending someone in my car. These
guys are handing over a T eight hundred and saying,
hope you've coded a good roundhouse kick. Is this just
a massive, expensive PR stunt.
Speaker 2: It's actually a very very calculated strategy disguised as a spectacle.
It all comes down to one word. Data. Engine AI
isn't just building a sport. They are building a stress
test that they could never possibly replicate in a lab.
What do you mean, well, think about it. A factory
floor is dangerous, sure, a disaster zone is dangerous. But
nothing is as unpredictable as chaotic as a combat scenario
against another intelligent agent that is actively trying to knock
you down.
Speaker 1: So by watching these robots fight, they're crowdsourcing the development
of more survival instincts.
Speaker 2: Precisely, think about the data points you're collecting. If a
robot can survive a full force roundhouse kick to the
chassis and stay standing.
Speaker 1: Then it can probably survive a forklift bumping into it
at the warehouse.
Speaker 2: That's exactly it. If it can take a fall, get
back up in under ten seconds and re engage, then
it could probably survive a collapsing wall in a search
and rescue mission. They're accelerating evolution by introducing predation. They're
finding every week, every software bug, every structural flaw by
letting other smart people try to break their stuff.
Speaker 1: That is actually brilliant, terrifying, but brilliant. And I saw
there's real money on the line too. This isn't just
for bragging rights.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. We're talking about a prize pot
of one point four to four million dollars and a belt.
Speaker 1: Oh tell me about the belt.
Speaker 2: It's a championship belt made of ten kilograms of solid gold.
Speaker 1: Ten kilos that's over twenty pounds of Gold's that's just
heavy valued.
Speaker 2: It roughly ten million r MB. It's pure spectacle, designed
to draw eyes and make this feel like a legitimate
high stake sport.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, So what about the rules. How does a
robot fight work?
Speaker 2: The rules are what make it interesting. From a technical standpoint,
it's a best of three format like a tennis match.
If a robot gets knocked down, it has ten seconds
to stand back up on its own. If it can't,
it's a knockout, just like boxing exactly. And here's the
real kicker for the engineers. If the human operators have
to physically step in to assist or reset the bot
more than twice, that's a TKO.
Speaker 1: A technical knockout.
Speaker 2: Yep. So the goal is total autonomy. You can't have
a human running out there every five seconds to pick
it up like a toddler who just fell over. It
has to be self sufficient in a hostile environment.
Speaker 1: Speaking of autonomy and stability, we have to talk about
the CEO Shaotanyang. We do because when the first footage
of the T eight hundred came out. The internet did
what the Internet does. This whole thing immediately cgi human
in a suit.
Speaker 2: It happens every time a major leap in robotics occurs.
We call it the Uncanny Valley of movement. Skepticism is natural.
You know, the movements look too fluid, the spinning kicks
were too perfect. People just couldn't believe it was real.
Speaker 1: So Chao Tanyang decides to debunk this, but he doesn't
issue a press release, He doesn't do a boring Q
and A with a PowerPoint. He gets in the ring.
Speaker 2: He did, and this is a testament to either his
incredible bravery or his absolute unshakable faith in his engineering team,
or both or both. Yeah, he suited up in this
heavy protective gear, I mean serious riot gear level padding
and stood in front of the T eight hundred.
Speaker 1: I saw the footage of this. It's haunting. The robot
isn't moving like a machine, It's moving like a predator.
It stabilizes its stance. You can almost see it calculating
the distance and then bam, a high torque sidekick right
to his chest.
Speaker 2: And let's be really clear about the physics here. This
was not a tap, this wasn't a love pad. The
impact literally lifted the CEO off the ground.
Speaker 1: He was airborne for a split second. Both his feet
are off the mat.
Speaker 2: He dropped straight onto the mat. There were no wires,
no hidden rigs, no special effects, just pure kinetic energy
transfer from a metal leg to a human.
Speaker 1: Torso and the robot did it fall over because Newton's
third law says for every action there is an equal
and opposite reaction. If it kicks him that hard, it
should fly backward.
Speaker 2: That is the key engineering detail. That's the magic. After
delivering that massive amount of force, that T eight hundred
didn't wobble, It didn't stumble backward, didn't even flinch nothing.
Its gyroscopic sensors and its control loops reset its balance
in milliseconds. It struck, and it returned to a ready
stance immediately. It was as if nothing had happened.
Speaker 1: That is the part that scares me. The CEO's reaction
was pretty telling too. He gets up and through his
helmet you can hear him say too violent.
Speaker 2: He literally joked that he couldn't guarantee he'd stay alive
for the next test.
Speaker 1: Which I mean is a pretty good way to prove
your point.
Speaker 2: It was an incredible stress demonstration. It proved the robot
is built for massive impact, but it also proved that
the T eight hundred is fundamentally a weapon. In that context,
it's not a helper at that moment. It's a striker.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get under the hood of this thing. What
makes it capable of kicking a grown man into the
air and not even wobbling.
Speaker 2: It really comes down to torque and power management. So
each joint motor in the T.
Speaker 1: Eight hundred, like the knee, the hip, the shoulder.
Speaker 2: Exactly, each of those joints delivers up to four hundred
and fifty newton meters of torque.
Speaker 1: Okay, pause there, for those of us who aren't mechanical engineers.
Put four hundred and fifty newton meters in perspective, is
that a lot?
Speaker 2: It is an immense amount for a joint the size
of a human knee. To give you a comparison, a
standard family set an engine, a four cylinder engine might
produce anywhere from two hundred to four hundred newton meters
of torque to move the entire car.
Speaker 1: The whole two ton car.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, we are talking about that kind of force
potential in a single joint. It is enough to generate
bone shattering momentum. The peak power output is instantaneous fourteen
thousand watts. It's just an explosion of energy on demand.
Speaker 1: But usually when you run that much power through a
motor that's small, it gets hot like melt, the plastic hot.
Speaker 2: Correct thermal throttling is the enemy of high performance robotics.
Usually a robot can do a cool trick once or twice,
and then it has to sit and cool down for
ten minutes so it doesn't fry its own.
Speaker 1: Circuits, right, it overheats.
Speaker 2: The T eight hundred features a world first active cooling
system built directly into.
Speaker 1: The leg joints, so it's like a radiator for its knees.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. It circulates coolant to keep
the motors at optimal temperatures even under extreme load.
Speaker 1: And what does that mean In practical terms, it means.
Speaker 2: It can fight, or work or run for up to
four hours without thermal throttling. It's the difference between a
sprinter who can only run one hundred meters and a
marathon runner who can sprint the entire way it has
endurance that is.
Speaker 1: A total game changer. And the brain running all this.
What's it using.
Speaker 2: It's using the Nvidia jets and Thord chip. This is
an absolute powerhouse of AI computing. It delivers two thousand tops.
Speaker 1: Sorry tops, what's that tops?
Speaker 2: It stands for trillions of operations per second?
Speaker 1: Two two thousand trillion operations per second.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's a staggering amount of compute power. It allows
the robot to process its entire environment through three hundred
and sixty degree lightar and stereodepth cameras in milliseconds. It
isn't just seeing pixels on a screen.
Speaker 1: It's perceiving the world.
Speaker 2: It is perceiving geometry. It understands depth, velocity, and trajectory
in real time. That's how it pulls off those cappaera
style transitions and spinning kicks. It knows exactly where its
limbs are and where its opponent is in three D
space at all times.
Speaker 1: I noticed that in the video it doesn't do the
robot shuffle, you know that bent knee crouching walk that
every robot seems to do.
Speaker 2: The Groucho Marx walk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, why do they do that?
Speaker 2: That's done for stability. It keeps the center of gravity
low so the robot doesn't tip over easily. It's a safer,
but much less efficient and less human like way to walk.
Speaker 1: But the T eight hundred doesn't.
Speaker 2: No, the T eight hundred uses straight leg walking. It
looks much more human, much more natural, but it is
infinitely harder to control because your center of gravity is
higher and constantly shifting. The fact that they have nailed
straight leg walking while also delivering combat level kicks is
a massive engineering flex. It's showing off.
Speaker 1: It really is, But you touched on something earlier the
why behind all this engine AI claims this combat first
approach speeds up their R and D cycle by thirty percent.
But are we kind of ignoring the elephant in the
room here? We are training these systems to be lethal
fighters first.
Speaker 2: It is a valid and very important concern. If the
foundational data set for this robot's movement, for its instincts
comes from violence and combat, what does that mean for
its future role in society?
Speaker 1: Right? We aren't training them to help gramdmas cross the street.
We're training them to sweep the leg exactly.
Speaker 2: Is the T eight hundred a breakthrough in robust engineering,
or are we just laying the foundation for a very
specific type of enforcement. Droid history suggests that technology developed
for combat eventually trickles down to civilian use, you know, GPS,
the Internet, jet engines, but the DNA of that technology,
its origin often remains. It's something we need to watch
very very closely.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of DNA and evolution, let's pivot from the
violence of the ring to the agility of the street.
Speaker 2: A complete tonal shift.
Speaker 1: Because while the T eight hundred is out there breaking bones,
or at least simulated bones, another robot is out there
shredding the asphalt.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Unitary g one. We are moving from the
heavy industrial violence of the T eight hundred to extremem
agility and frankly, a sense of playfulness.
Speaker 1: Unitru's g one robot just learned to skateboard. And I
don't mean it stood on a moving board someone pushed.
I mean it learned to skate right.
Speaker 2: And crucially, this was not a staged lab trick with
a safety tedt or holding it up in a perfectly
smooth floor. This was out in the open world, on
real asphalt, dealing with friction and cracks and uneven surfaces.
Speaker 1: This was a collaboration, right. It wasn't just unitry working
in a vacuum.
Speaker 2: No, it was a massive joint effort. Unitary partnered with
China Telecom's Tealai Institute and also Shanghai jou Tan University.
They developed a whole new control framework for this called Husky.
Speaker 1: Husky I like that sounds sturdy.
Speaker 2: It stands for a physics aware whole body control system,
and that physics wear part is the entire secret.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us. What makes it different
from just programming an animation that says move left leg
now than move right arm.
Speaker 2: So when you program an animation, the robot is just
hitting its marks. It's like following a dance chart. It
doesn't know why it's moving that way. It's just executing
a seat quince. The Husky framework allows the g one
to actually reason about physics in real time.
Speaker 1: It understands the world around it.
Speaker 2: It understands that if it shifts its weight to the left,
the board will tilt, the wheels will turn, and centrifugal
force will act on its body.
Speaker 1: It's not just moving, it's balancing, so it's feeling the ride.
Speaker 2: In a mathematical sense. Yes, it isn't just replaying a
script from memory. It is constantly reacting to the board
under its feet. If the board hits a pebble and wobbles,
the robot instinctively or rather computationally, adjusts its center of
mass in milliseconds to compensate.
Speaker 1: That is just wild, and the way they taught it
is fascinating too. This whole sim to real thing.
Speaker 2: This is the secret sauce of modern robotics. This is
how they're learning so fast. You don't teach a robot
to skateboard by pushing it down a hill one thousand
dimes and breaking a thousand very expensive robots. You build
a perfect physics simulation, a video game essentially, that perfectly
mimics the real world gravity, friction, win, resistance.
Speaker 1: All of it, and you just let the digital version
of the robot fail millions of times inside the computer exactly.
Speaker 2: They ran thousands of parallel training environments at the same time.
They compress millions and millions of motion trials into just
twenty hours of compute time.
Speaker 1: Twenty hours, that's it. A human takes years to get
that good.
Speaker 2: That's the power of reinforcement learning in less than a
day of processing, The AI learned the equivalent of years
of human practice through trial and error at an accelerated pace.
Speaker 1: That speed is well, it's terrifyingly fast. I mean, imagine
if I could learn to play the piano in twenty
hours just by thinking about it really really hard.
Speaker 2: It's the matrix concept, isn't it. I know, kung fu.
Once the algorithm solves the physics of the task and
the simulation, they just transfer that brain directly into the
physical g one robot. And because the simulation was so accurate,
the robot steps onto the real skateboard and just goes.
Speaker 1: And what can it actually do? It's not just like
rolling forward in a straight line.
Speaker 2: Oh no, it's actively pushing off with one leg to
get speed, which requires balancing on one foot on a
moving object. By the way, it's steering by leaning its body.
It can mount and dismount the board while the board
is still moving, and crucially, it can recover its balance
when someone nudges it.
Speaker 1: That nudge recovery is huge. That means it's robust, it's
not fragile.
Speaker 2: It implies that once a robot learns the physics of
a task, any task it can master it faster than
a human ever could. Skateboarding is just the cool demo. Yeah,
now apply that same learning process to walking on the
deck of a tossing ship or navigating a cluttered construction site.
The implications are endless.
Speaker 1: So we have the fighter and we have the skater.
But let's talk about the one that's actually going to
pay the bills, the worker.
Speaker 2: That brings us to the titan of the industry.
Speaker 1: Boston Dynamics, the OG, the one everyone knows, the.
Speaker 2: OG, and they have completely utterly leveled up with the
new outlics.
Speaker 1: Now, there was a bit of drama here, right because
back in early January there was a leak.
Speaker 2: There was some footage surface of the new Atlas looking
well shaky, Yeah, not great. It looked unstable. There was
visible damage to the palm mechanisms, the hands. The Internet
did what the Internet does and immediately declared that Boston
Dynamics was years away from a production model. I said, look,
it's broken. They've lost their touch.
Speaker 1: And then one month later CES happens, the big tech show,
and they just.
Speaker 2: Dropped the mic. They revealed the production ready electric atlics
and it wasn't shaky. It was flawless, and it's big.
Speaker 1: I was reading the specs. Seven and a half feet tall.
Speaker 2: That is massive?
Speaker 1: Why so big? That seems impractical for a human world.
It won't fit through a normal door.
Speaker 2: It's not designed for our living rooms. It's designed for
warehouses and factories. It's about leverage and reach. If you're
building a factory robot, you wanted to be able to
reach high shelves, handle large, heavy components, and exert serious force.
At seven point five feet, it towers over human workers,
but it fits into the industrial scale perfectly. It can
reach things you'd need a forklift or a ladder for.
Speaker 1: And it's electric now, not hydraulic, because the old Atlas
was famous for being really loud, all those hydraulic fluids
and pumps.
Speaker 2: Yes, the switch to electric actuators is a huge deal.
That means it's much quieter, it's cleaner, and it's far
easier to maintain. You don't have to worry about leaking
hydraulic oil all over the factory floor.
Speaker 1: And the strength, what can it do?
Speaker 2: It can handle one hundred and ten pound loads, which
is significant if you're a human and you have to
lift one hundred and ten pounds over and over again
all day. You're going to blow out your back. Atlas
can do it twenty four to seven without a coffee break.
Speaker 1: And it can operate in extreme temperatures too. I saw
from minus four degrees fahrenheit up to one hundred and
four degrees so it can work in.
Speaker 2: A giant freezer warehouse or a sweltering foundry without a
single complaint. But the physical specs, as impressive as they are,
aren't even the most amazing part.
Speaker 1: It's the brain.
Speaker 2: It's the brain. This is the partnership with Google Deep
Mind using their Gemini AI. Boston Dynamics has always had
the best bodies in the businesiness, the best hardware, but
their brains were often hard coded, very specific, rigid instructions
for specific tasks. Now they've integrated Gemini, and this means
Atlas isn't just programmed to do step A then step B.
It is problem solving.
Speaker 1: So if a box is slightly out of place, it
doesn't just freeze and throw an error message exactly.
Speaker 2: It observes the situation, It reasons about what it needs
to do, and it adjusts its plan. They claim it
can master entirely new factory tasks. In under twenty four hours,
just by observing a human do it. Wait what, You
don't have to write thousands of lines of new code.
You just show it what to do and the learns.
Speaker 1: That is the holy grail of automation. Watch me then
do it forever without getting tired.
Speaker 2: It is, and the scale of production here is serious.
This isn't lab toy anymore. Hyundi Motors is building a
dedicated facility to manufacture thirty thousand of these units annually.
Speaker 1: Thirty thousand a year. That's not a boutique experiment. That's
an army of workers.
Speaker 2: They expect deployment in American factories within the next two years.
These things will be swapping their own batteries out working
twenty four hour shifts. The shift from cool prototype on
YouTube to mass manufactured labor is officially here. It's happening.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've talked about the Fighter, the Skater, and the
factory Titan. All of them are unbelievably impressive, but they're
also While they're metal, they're cold, they're clearly machines.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the other end of the spectrum,
the psychological end, the Uncanny.
Speaker 1: Valley Droid up This Shanghai startup unveiled a robot called Moya,
And this one isn't about how much it can lift
or how hard it can kick. It's about how it feels.
Speaker 2: The uncanny valley is that term we use to describe
that creepy, unsettling feeling when a robot looks almost human
but not quite. There's just something wrong about it. Moya
is trying to bridge that valley by.
Speaker 1: Being warm, literally warm to the touch.
Speaker 2: Yes, the skin is a very high end silicone, but
it's heated from within. It mimics human skin texture and
thermal output.
Speaker 1: I have to stop you there because the idea of
shaking a robot's hand and feeling heat that just messes
with my head. That feels deeply, deeply weird, maybe even deceptive.
Speaker 2: It's a powerful psychological trigger. Evolution is taught us for
millions of years that warm things are alive, right, and
cold things are dead or inanimate. When you touch something
that looks human and feels warm, your brain instantly categorizes
it differently. It creates a sense of presence, a sense
of life. It basically hacks your empathy response.
Speaker 1: And the face is just as advanced.
Speaker 2: Irate twenty five degrees of freedom in the face alone.
Speaker 1: Explain degrees of freedom for the listeners. What does that mean.
Speaker 2: It means there are twenty five separate tiny motors or
actuators just controlling the facial movements. This allows for incredibly
subtle micro expressions.
Speaker 1: So not just a fixed smile or a frown.
Speaker 2: No, a slight, almost imperceptible raise of one eyebrow, a
subtle purse of the lips, the tiny nonverbal cues that
we humans use to communicate complex emotion without even saying
a word.
Speaker 1: And physically, Moya is much smaller than something like Atlas.
Speaker 2: A way smaller. It's five foot five hours, so about
average human height, and weighs only thirty two kilograms.
Speaker 1: Thirty two kilogram that's like seventy pounds. That is incredibly light,
shockingly light.
Speaker 2: It uses a walker skeleton, which they actually evolved from
a previous bot they built that was designed to run marathons,
and it uses these lightweight lattice muscle materials instead of heavy,
bulky motors for everything. It's designed to be non threatening.
Speaker 1: And what is the use case here? It's not fighting
in the octagon or working in a factory definitely not.
Speaker 2: This is designed for elder care, for companionship. If you
are building a robot to help an elderly person out
of a chair or just to sit with them and
provide a comforting presence, you don't want a seven point
five foot industrial giant.
Speaker 1: No, that would be terrifying.
Speaker 2: You want something approachable, something soft, something warm.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating, but it also raises that question you mentioned earlier.
If it looks human, fuels warm, and reacts with emotion,
does that make make us accept it more or does
it make it harder to remember that it's still just
a machine.
Speaker 2: That is the ethical tightrope they're walking. We project emotions
onto our cars and our toasters. Imagine what we will
project on Da Mooya.
Speaker 1: That's a really good point, but you know, not every
robot is perfect, and honestly, after hearing about all this
incredible success, I think that's a good thing. We need
to talk about Xpang in their robot Iron.
Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1: The Shenzen incident, the face plant heard around the world.
Speaker 2: It was a very very public failure. Expang's Iron robot
was doing a demo and a crowded shopping mall in Chenzen.
It was just walking through the crowd.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it just face planted.
Speaker 2: Lost its balance and went down hard face first. The
video was everywhere.
Speaker 1: Instantly, but the CEO, a guy named Hang, he didn't
try to bury it. He didn't issue copyright strikes on
the videos or pretend it didn't happen.
Speaker 2: No, and that was a very very smart move. He
got out in front of it and called it part
of the learning process. He embraced the failure publicly.
Speaker 1: There was also a controversy that the robot was fake.
Right before it even fell, people thought it moved too smoothly.
Speaker 2: It's the reverse of the T eight hundred skepticism. With
the T eight hundred, people said it's too good to
be real. With Iron, people said it's too smooth to
be a robot. They accused x Bang of just putting
a human in a suit.
Speaker 1: So how did they prove it wasn't a guy named
Steve in a latex mask.
Speaker 2: The CEO, during a live demonstration, literally peeled back the
robot's skin on its arm. No way, Yes, live on stage.
He exposed the motors, the wiring, the lattice muscles underneath.
Speaker 1: That's pretty metal. You think I'm fake? Here's my insides.
Speaker 2: It completely silenced the critics, but it also highlighted their
unique design philosophy. They are using these lattice muscles to
mimic biological muscle. It gives that smooth, fluid contraction that
looks so human, which is exactly why people were suspicious
in the first place.
Speaker 1: And they have a pony robot too. I saw something
about that.
Speaker 2: They do a quadruped so walks on four legs, but
this one has a brilliant twist. It has a flexible
robotic arm that acts like a tail.
Speaker 1: A tail look a dog, but a functional tail.
Speaker 2: It can tuck between its legs when it's not needed,
or it can extend out to grab objects, open doors,
press elevator buttons. It's a brilliant use of the quadruped
form factor adding a fifth manipulator.
Speaker 1: I think the biggest takeaway from XPEG for me is
that transparency works. Seeing a robot fall and seeing the
company own it makes me trust them more than seeing
another perfectly edited sizzle reel where nothing ever goes wrong.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. It reminds us that these are incredibly complex systems
operating in a chaotic real world. Failure is data. Failure
is how you learn.
Speaker 1: Speaking of the real world in public perception, we have
to talk about the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2: The biggest advertising stage on the planet.
Speaker 1: Open Ai they aired an AD one hundred million plus viewers,
and everyone was expecting, I don't know, chatchept on a screen,
some abstract sci fi voiceover.
Speaker 2: Instead we got hands, just hands, that's it, human hands working, creating, building, painting,
and then so subtly robotic hands joining us in being
guided by the human hands.
Speaker 1: It was so understated. There were no explosions, no glowing
red terminator eyes, nothing scary at.
Speaker 2: All, and that was the brilliance of it. It framed
robots not as autonomous overlords or are scary replacements, but
as tools, as extensions of human intent and creativity.
Speaker 1: They mentioned Codex, which is their coding agent, but the
visual language was all about physical manipulation, about touching the
world exactly.
Speaker 2: OpenAI is primarily a software company, right, an AI company,
But putting hardware specifically by manual robotic manipulation in the
most expensive AD slot on Earth is a massive signal.
Speaker 1: What's the signal?
Speaker 2: They are telling us that intelligence is flowing out of
the computer screens and into the physical.
Speaker 1: World, embodied AI.
Speaker 2: Embodied AI the concept that to truly understand the world,
to have common sense, AI needs a body. It needs
to be able to touch things, move things, and learn from
physical interaction.
Speaker 1: And the fact that they showed it as a collaboration
human hand guiding robot eid hand it just normalizes the
whole idea. It says, this is just a fancy hammer,
this is just a better screwdriver. Don't be afraid.
Speaker 2: It effectively de escalates the fear, unlike the T eight hundred,
which amps up the fear in the spectacle for entertainment.
Open AI is trying to make robotics seem almost boring.
Utilitarian and boring is how a technology becomes ubiquitous.
Speaker 1: So if we pull this thread all the way through,
we have covered the entire spectrum. Today we have the
Gladiator engine AI's T eight hundred training for combat to
become unbreakable. We have the athlete Unitares G one learning
physics to skate through the world. We have the worker
Boston Dynamics at LISS, the seven point five foot giant
ready for the factory floor, the Industrial Titan. We have
the companion Moya with its warm skin and emotional face,
and finally we have the tool open AI's quiet vision
of collaborative hands.
Speaker 2: It's a completely diverging path. It's like we're at a
fork in the road. On one side, we are actively
building a new species of athletes and warriors, machines that
can physically outperform us withstand punishment we can't, and fight
in ways we can only imagine. And on the other
on the other side, we're building these gentle warm, collaborative
extensions of ourselves, helpers and tools.
Speaker 1: And that's the big question I want to leave our
listeners with today. Which of those paths is going to
define the future? Are we building competitors or are we
building partners? The T eight hundred is cool, there's no
doubt about. It's thrilling to watch. But do you want
a T eight hundred in your house? I do not,
Or do you want Amoya?
Speaker 2: Or perhaps the future isn't one or the other. Maybe
it's a world where the factory floor is run by
the giants, the streets are navigated by the skaters, and
our homes and hospitals are shared with the companions, a
specialized future.
Speaker 1: It's a lot to process. I really want to ask you,
the listener a direct question, would you step into the
ram with a T eight hundred, even with the best
armor on the planet. I know my answer absolutely not.
Or maybe more realistically, how would you feel holding the
warm hand of a robot like Moya? Would that comfort
you or would it just creep you out?
Speaker 2: It's a question of psychology as much as it is
a question of technology.
Speaker 1: Isn't it It really is. Leave a comment and let
us know your take. We really want to hear what
you think about this absolute explosion of humanoid tech.
Speaker 2: It's moving fast. Don't blink or you'll miss the next
lead forward exactly.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to thrilling Threads. We'll catch you in
the next one.