Robotics Has Been Stuck for 70 Years — Deepak Pathak, Skild AI

Why watch

Deepak Pathak explains why robotics has made minimal progress since the 1950s despite massive hardware advances, arguing the field treated robotics as a hardware problem rather than a data/brain problem. He presents Skild AI's solution: a single model architecture pre-trained on simulation and human video, post-trained on teleoperation data, that can generalize across any robot body and task. Demonstrations include AirPods insertion with simple grippers, omelet cooking on $4,000 arms, and NVIDIA GPU assembly. For ML engineers and robotics researchers interested in the path to general-purpose robots.