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IFP @_brianpotter explains why factories full of expensive machinery still struggle to build houses cheaper than workers using basic hand tools: "You can, and plenty of people do. What you can’t do is make prefab cheaper and better enough than conventional construction that it becomes the new default." "Construction is simple enough that you don’t need a bunch of big, expensive equipment to do it. People can stitch a house together with basically hand tools. So it is hard for a factory that…
MTS@MTSlive4h ago
FULL INTERVIEW: Brian Potter says robots learned kung fu before they learned to pick things up because motion is easy to train in simulation and grabbing objects isn't. The fix catching on now is putting "Hulk hands" with cameras on humans to record the data. @_brianpotter writes Construction Physics and is a senior infrastructure fellow at @IFP. He joined @theojaffee and @schisofrenia to break down how AI drives robots, why prefab houses still can't beat hand tools, and the rise and fall of the plasma screen: 00:56 the rise and fall of the plasma screen 04:40 how vision-language-action models drive robots 06:33 why data is the hardest part of robotics 07:46 GPT-6 Astra, and whether frontier models make robot models obsolete 09:51 teleoperation vs simulation 10:18 why robots can do kung fu but can't grab things 11:07 UMI, or giving humans Hulk hands 11:56 how to actually learn how things get built 16:47 why prefab houses still can't beat hand tools 18:12 if we can prefab chips, why not houses 19:07 why cheap robots could fix construction
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