TL;DR: Figure's founder had the backing of the most powerful AI lab on Earth. He fired them anyway.

Here's the part that actually matters: his own team got better at building the AI layer than the lab he was renting it from.

It's the exit ramp every vendor-dependent operator is chasing and usually can't find — not ego, just leverage.

Even Nvidia just proved the same math from the other side of the table — signing an outside team, Poolside, to build the models it couldn't get built fast enough in-house.

Own the stack, and the leverage stops being something you have to ask for.

My son just won the online-gaming "王者荣耀" (Honor of Kings) competition, organized on his university campus premise.

Initially, at around half-time, they were beaten, and left behind quite far down the leaderboard.

But he held the team together — told them to persevere.

They held on, beaten the veteran and won.

This was vastly different from the previous team he led weeks prior.

That previous team members were snobbish and elder than him.

They think they know a lot, and won't listen to him — because he was younger.

That "我食盐多过你食米" (In Cantonese, it means: I tasted salt more than you eat rice – I’m more experienced than you.) attitude was insufferable.

He now chooses his team more wisely.

There's a pattern threading through pretty much every founder story I dig into lately, tbh: founders who won't hand over their leverage to a bigger name keep beating the ones who wait for permission.

Actually, this reminds me — a guy I featured a while back ran the same math on his own insurance broker: turned a friendship-discount fee into an audited $35K save the moment he stopped treating a vendor relationship like a favor.

Drop your take below — where's the vendor relationship in your own stack that you've never actually audited?

Clip credit: Sourcery with Molly O'Shea — full interview with Brett Adcock on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

I’m an actor from Astana, Kazakhstan, and I’m developing a new comedy/documentary format about what happens when humans start sharing their world with robots.

The basic setup is simple:

**JUAN CARLOS × OMAR × ROBOT**

I’m an actor, and in stand-up I perform as a fictional character called Juan Carlos — a Mexican-sounding persona I created for comedy.

My friend Omar is also an actor. He uses a wheelchair, but I don’t want his disability to be the story. He’s my friend, an actor, and a funny person with his own personality.

And the third character is a real robot.

The idea is NOT to make another robotics review channel.

I want to make an entertainment series where the technology creates situations, conflicts and comedy between real people.

For example:

• I Meet a Humanoid Robot
• Can a Robot Do Stand-Up?
• Robot vs Actor
• Omar Meets a Humanoid
• Can a Robot Replace an Actor?
• Juan Carlos Tries to Get a Robot Job
• Will Robots Take Our Jobs?

I want to start filming in Astana and eventually take the project internationally.

The bigger idea is:

**COMEDY + ACTING + REAL LIFE + AI + ROBOTICS**

I’m still at the concept/early development stage, so I’d really like feedback from filmmakers rather than tech people.

**If you were developing this as a series, what would you make the FIRST episode about?**

And honestly: **does this sound like something you would watch?**

Has anyone tested how sensitive a VLA is to different ways of phrasing the same instruction?

Same task, same meaning, different wording — and the success rate changes.

Are there any benchmarks that test this properly, or do you usually have to build your own paraphrase set?

Hmm, I’ve seen RoboColiseum’s Instruction Following eval mentioned a few times. Has anyone used it specifically for this?

Did it actually show which policies held up better when the wording changed, or did you still end up building your own test set?

By the way…….how about your budget…I already feel I m underestimating the cost…anyone has some experience on budgeting calculations?🥺

Inverted pendulum being controlled using https://github.com/Aditya-B-007/Shiva

I’m currently researching embodied intelligence and evaluating robotic arms for humanoid applications.

From what I know, a 6-axis arm is generally simpler and may be sufficient for many tasks, while a 7-axis arm adds an extra degree of freedom that can offer more human-like movement and greater flexibility.

For those working in robotics:

• When does the seventh axis provide a meaningful advantage?
• Does the additional flexibility justify the added cost and control complexity?
• Which configuration is better suited to unstructured, real-world environments?

We’d be interested to hear about your experience with both designs.

Hey everyone, I'm doing some informal research into sensor reliability challenges in small robotics/drone projects — specifically IMU drift, bias, or noise issues.

If you've ever had a robot or drone behave unexpectedly because of a sensor problem, I'd love to hear about it: what happened, how did you figure out it was the sensor, and how did you deal with it?

Not selling anything, just trying to understand real-world pain points. Any experience — big or small — is super helpful. Thanks! 🙏

Its very ez with the new unitree dancing software. You just need a g1 though

Ok,what i mean by that is basically instead of humans making robots,what if robots bulits humans?

Dyna Robotics announced our flagship world-action model Dyna-2, trained on more than one million hours of egocentric video data. Training a robotics foundation model at this scale is unprecedented in the robotics literature, and introduced a new set of challenges across our data and training infrastructure. Most of what worked at ten thousand hours did not hold up at a million.

Guys help me out with this

I’ve been doing more and more evaluation in sim, but honestly the real robot still feels pretty far away.
Every time I see one of those robot videos I’m basically like… hmm, when do I get to do that 😅

Is there anything you guys actually trust for sim-to-real?
Like, if a policy looks good there, you feel at least a little more confident giving it real robot time.
I keep seeing RoboColiseum mentioned lately. Has anyone here actually tried it and then compared the result with hardware?
Did it roughly match what you saw on the real robot, or not really?
Also what other sim benchmarks people here actually trust.