Promised 5,000 Optimus this year. "Tesla slashed its production goal to 2,000 a few months later ... Then, ... summer, staffers told Musk Tesla could meet the 2,000 target, but the robots wouldn’t be very useful due to issues with their hands." But, dancing!! www.theinformation.com/articles/elo...

From my previous company. This Sawyer ran for 35,236 hours in a factory in Oregon. You can move within its workspace, and grab it as it is operating. This is what real robots, real deployments, and real ROI are all about; productive, reliable, and safe operation. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

My attempt to establish cred as a humanoid realist may not be working as well as I hoped. Today I was offered a chance to invest in a pre-seed for a humanoid robot company that will have $1T (yes they said "T") revenues in 7 years. Repeat essay from last Friday: rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-h...

Just for the record this is a stupid headline. The robots are carrying out automated steps moving samples around and using vision to apply tools. They don't "know" what they are doing and certainly have no conception(!) of what a baby, human, or conception are. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

My 2nd law of robotics: When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times. -- Here it is cops stymied by Waymos. www.sfgate.com/bayarea/arti...

I have just finished and just published some weekend reading for you. 9,600 words of not easy reading, on why today's humanoid robots won't learn to be dexterous. rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-h...

A few months ago I sat down to talk with @bheater.bsky.social about humanoids, automation, and deploying them at scale. He published it on his automate outlet today. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qxO...

In 2011 I wrote a review of Alan Turing's 1948 paper Intelligent Machinery where he considered the case for embodied intelligence. My review was intended for a 2012 centenary celebration of Turing's birth, but no proceedings were published. So here it is. rodneybrooks.com/alan-turing-...

This is a thoughtful review of the new book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. I might rephrase it in terms of 2 of my 7 deadly sins of predicting the future of AI: performance vs competence, & indistinguishability of sufficiently advanced technology from magic. www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

Our team at Robust AI makes robots more intuitive for real users. We're not replacing people, we are giving them superpowers with robots that understand when and how to help them. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

This story says that there is yet another entrant in the humanoid space. Oh, good grief! www.wired.com/story/openai...

Tom Dietterich ‪@tdietterich.bsky.social‬ talks about the problem of AI generated papers being a virtual DOS attack on human reviewers, and suggests some new rules for this new situation.

Evan Ackerman has been a thoughtful reporter on robotics for a decade or more @spectrum.ieee.org spectrum.ieee.org/humanoid-rob...

Benjie Holson has come up with a humanoid robot Olympics, all events are trivial for real humans. generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-hu...

1/5 A poem by Adrienne Rich, 1961, titled "Artificial Intelligence" dedicated to GPS (of Newell and Simon). Eerily prophetic and a great description of LLMs "when they make you write your poetry, later on". On page 136 of this book: www.amazon.com/dp/039328511...

1/5 A poem titled "Artificial Intelligence" from 1961, dedicated to GPS (of Newell and Simon), by poet Adrienne Rich. Very prophetic, and eerily describes the how LLMs write poetry, "when they make you write your poems, later on". It is on page 136 of this book: www.amazon.com/dp/039328511...

1/2 AI pipe dreams. ‘[N]anotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information,’ Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near (2005).’ aeon.co/essays/no-su...

Gotten my home paper archives down from 24 to just 1 file cabinet (but my total bit archive is > the world's archive level in early '90s). As I further pared down my archives today I came across my Roomba design notes from '98. I remembered the "Clean Team", but not "Cybersuck"! Relevant today...

Rocket Lab has over 60 successful orbital launches with small payload on Electron with 3D-printed engines. Just opened their Wallops Island VA launch pad for much bigger payload Neutron, with fully reusable first stage. First launch scheduled for later this year. www.extremetech.com/aerospace/ro...

BREAKING: Big moment as CDC staff stage a mass walkout. They have lined the street outside its HQ to greet and salute the four top officials who have resigned in protest at RFK Jr’s attack on the agency’s science base. (🎥 AP)

I stand corrected. I drive on 101 twice a day, but have not seen an uncrewed Waymo on it myself. Thanks @aniccia.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC0t...

Waymo in SF Bay Area is in two disconnected areas, and no autonomous Waymos on 280 or 101. This morning I saw two driverful Blue Waymos on 101 outside of their service areas both north and south of SFO. My inference: Waymo is trying to connect the two areas and to SFO.

Looks like Starship met all its objectives today. Significant progress from a hard past year. Congratulations SpaceX.

Tonight's Starship launch is make or break on whether the US lands Astronauts on the Moon this decade. Another failure now says no way. Complete success gives SpaceX a lifeline at NASA but still low odds their tech will be ready in time. www.cnn.com/2025/08/23/s...

The ability to talk about geometry in coherent English does not equal understanding geometry. We have neurons in our hippocampus and our entorhinal cortex that turn into a geometry engine. ChatGTP5 does not and confidently spews bullshit about the simplest of things. mindmatters.ai/2025/08/chat...

Come January I will have been full time in AI and robotics for fifty years. I've lived through and been part of most of their history, and know their pre-me history pretty well. I'm the old guy in therapy here...

James Lovell: “We don’t go to heaven when we die, we go to heaven when we’re born.” Lovell said, “There is a heaven, and God has given you the opportunity to enjoy the best things in life right here on Earth, right now.” www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Architecturally ChatGPT can't but help make shit up. "I just had people show up for an all day robotics event at Circuit Launch that ChatGPT totally fabricated, complete with hours and our address." It combined info about real meetups with info from Andra's calendar. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Back on June 23rd I posted a .pdf of a piece on AI hype that I had written 37 years ago. Here it is transcribed in my blog, with some commentary on two of the things that I said in 1988 had been overhyped in 1949 and 1962. rodneybrooks.com/ai-great-exp...

@lorak.bsky.social reports that Tesla must pay part of $329M damages today for a single death by FSD due to deceptive marketting. This may open a whole lot more lawsuits against them. www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/t...

Good headline. Also: "Between 2017 and 2021, The Boring Company canceled or postponed similar projects in Chicago; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; the California cities of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Jose; and one from Baltimore to Washington, DC." www.cnn.com/2025/07/28/b...

Read this and laugh (or cry). "the design is ill-considered, the atmosphere is an afterthought, the system is disorganized, and the food is disappointing" -- symptomatic of an ego disconnected from the real world. www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Asteroid Institute just launched Trajectory, a new tool on our ADAM platform. Run on Google Cloud, it helps explore launch paths to solar system objects. bit.ly/450JWo5 @robpike.io @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social @neqone.bsky.social @philplait.bsky.social @b0yle.bsky.social @boslough.bsky.social

Feeling good about the rush to tech-savvyness signaling by rushing to deploy largely untested LLM based tools in critical paths yet? A tool to help with evaluating and approving potentially unsafe things better be n squared-ish as good as the thing it might approve. www.cnn.com/2025/07/23/p...

I have said that LLMs need to be carefully boxed in if they are attached to anything besides humans. This story is apparently true (but the wording over anthropomorphizes). LLMs are not reasoning, they are generating words that sound good, and cannot be trusted. www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

My robots, from three different companies (five distinct families), have been sold on six continents, but have been deployed on seven! "First, there was Bert, a Roomba 652, who arrived at the station in 2018 and was for a time the loneliest robot in the world."😪 spectrum.ieee.org/south-pole-r...

56 years since Moon landing. Hype is not new: Thomas Paine, NASA Administrator at the time, was so optimistic about the future of progress in space flight that he predicted vacations on the moon—for as little as $5,000 for a round trip—within two decades of the moon landing. time.com/5629566/1969...

If you've seen recent claims on genAI doing well at math exams read the commentary by the greatest living mathematician, who uses tech a lot in math. (Tao & I graduated from the same math dept & had the same profs. He is way younger than me and way, way, way better!!!) mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1148814...

SpaceX now has permission to rain down Starship debris around Hawaii 25 times per year. Seems at odds with fully reusable, and with ready to go to Mars next year... www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"call them leaners—giant, full-length mirrors in heavy frames you...prop against a wall. I call them Roomba bait...asking for trouble...with...a robotic vacuum with poor depth perception." Proud to have delivered AI&robots to homes before people had heard of either:2002. www.wsj.com/style/design...

Shakespeare understood all of us, including kings and wannabe kings. His words in Macbeth give us hope: Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

[I'll get back to AI/robotics soon...] Boeing's Startliner which had troubles on if first crewed flight last year, will not fly again until early 2026, probably uncrewed. Next crewed flight is now thought to be late in 2026. www.space.com/space-explor...

July 16th was the 56th anniversary of the 1969 Apollo 11 launch to the Moon (third flight to the Moon) where there would be a landing of people on another planety thing for the first time. There was precisely one woman in the control room. Here she is: www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=25702

Voyager 1 (launched 1977) had failure of primary roll thrusters in 2004, so NASA just used backup roll thrusters, but now they were getting clogged. A 21 year delayed power cycle fixed the primary ones a billion miles away. (from March) www.space.com/space-explor...

I am doing a new startup working on AGF - Artificial General Food. I already have the cloud working on building a Food Foundational Model. Soon I will be able to design and manufacture the ultimate food, So Good, or SG. Other food will be obselete. Valuation: $1 quadrillion!

I just posted this on ExTwitter. x.com/rodneyabrook...

"Others" = Models S+X+CyberT sold 10,400 in Q2 (down from 21,500 last year) and 12,900 in Q1 including 7,100 CyberTs. So at less than 10% so far of the 250K CyberTs per year he promised investors for 2025 just 2 years ago. If it comes out of his mouth it will not happen. www.cnn.com/2025/07/04/b...

@newsweek.com From last week, based on interviews with Yann LeCun, David Eagleman, and me. The three of us could be described as AI realists, and have devoted our lives to AI and understanding intelligence. www.newsweek.com/2025/07/04/a...

1/2 Headline wrong: not "first". Robot Soccer has been an international competition for 30+ years. People newly aware of something often think it has just happened now and progress will be fast. See the ten+ year old photo in my second skeet. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

An in depth review of Tesla's "rollout" of robotaxis last weekend, consistent with many reports I have read. 10 cars over 2 days, safety override person in front seat, Tesla associates as passengers, and many failures. Not ready for primetime. *Way* behind Waymo. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...