Researcher's Guide to Physical AI

Every week, a deep-yet-accessible 15-minute briefing on what happened in Physical AI: robot foundation models, humanoids, manipulation, simulation, world models, and the research behind them. Built for researchers and curious newcomers alike, every episode gives you the background you need, then goes deep with concrete examples. Each episode ships with a long-form written deep dive. Every episode ships with a long-form written deep dive, full method details, benchmark numbers and links to every paper, at https://physicalaipodcast.co

Episodes

Black Forest Labs Beat NVIDIA, Figure's Rival Did the Maths

September 26, 2026 • 13 mins

Black Forest Labs, the company behind the FLUX image models, put out the best open robot policy going and then paid an outside firm to run it blind on an arm it doesn't own: 28 of 30, against 13 for pi-0.5. Figure's home-robot success rate turned out to have a denominator all along, 237 of 420, and a rival CEO read it straight back at them. Also: a group in Beijing traced the physics failures in video world models to a positional e...

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Amodei Says Slow Down, Huang Says No, Figure Leaves the Lab

September 19, 2026 • 11 mins

Dario Amodei asked the frontier labs to pace themselves, Sam Altman said OpenAI would match one commitment, and two days later Jensen Huang told the President on speakerphone "we're not going to let that happen, sir." The essay never mentions robots, though nearly everyone on both sides of it owns a stake in one, and nobody said whether a robot foundation model is part of what gets paced. Then Figure sent its humanoids into thirty ...

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Agility $1.8M of Robots, Skild $100M ARR, Depth for Free

September 12, 2026 • 11 mins

A humanoid maker's books went public for the first time under securities law, and they show $1.8 million of robot sales against a $2.5 billion merger valuation, while the company selling robot software rather than robots reported fifty-five times that in recurring revenue. In the same seven days, three groups published three incompatible answers to where a robot's imagination should come from, and none of them cites the others. Als...

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NVIDIA Bought Hugging Face and Never Said Robots

September 5, 2026 • 16 mins

NVIDIA agreed to buy Hugging Face for just under thirteen billion dollars, which puts the shelf almost every open robot model sits on inside the company that sells the chips those models train on. Its own announcement of the deal never uses the word robotics, not once, and three days earlier a small company in Oslo opened a graded, licensed marketplace for humanoid training data in Hugging Face's robot file format. Also: Skild clai...

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Anthropic Wants to Sit Between AI and Machines

August 29, 2026 • 16 mins

Anthropic previewed a driver specification that would let any model discover and operate a microscope, a laser or a robot arm, and in the limitations section of the same announcement it says the model can't reliably predict that shaking a liquid makes bubbles. On the same day, a federal judge threw out the Pentagon's blacklisting of the company for refusing to let its models drive autonomous weapons. Also: Unitree gave back half it...

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Anthropic Aims for a Record IPO, Unitree Up 460%

August 22, 2026 • 17 mins

Anthropic has told its bankers it expects the largest first-time share sale in history, and it is reportedly still trying to buy a world-model company for six billion dollars while it does. A private lab can fund a five-year bet on physics, and a public one answers to a quarterly clock, which makes this the most consequential open question in Physical AI right now. Also: Unitree closed its first day of trading up 460 percent on a s...

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Your Simulator Has Never Seen a Robot Fail

August 15, 2026 • 16 mins

About twenty researchers spent a paper writing down, formally, the rule that when you tell a learned simulator to move the robot's arm, the arm should move. Six of the open-source world models the field builds on don't reliably obey, and a second paper explains why: trained only on successful demonstrations, they've never had a reason to learn what a bad action does, so feed them one and they show you the task succeeding anyway. Al...

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Looks Like Physics, Isn't Physics, and World Action Models

August 8, 2026 • 11 mins

Two teams tested, independently and in the same week, whether the video-generating world models robotics is betting on actually understand physics. They get the shape of a falling mug right and the numbers underneath it wrong, which matters, because these are the simulators meant to replace real robot data. Also: why choosing your training video beats collecting more of it, a robot that spots a fake instruction and obeys it anyway,...

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Researcher's Guide to Physical AI

Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Black Forest Labs Beat NVIDIA, Figure's Rival Did the Maths

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Amodei Says Slow Down, Huang Says No, Figure Leaves the Lab

Agility $1.8M of Robots, Skild $100M ARR, Depth for Free

NVIDIA Bought Hugging Face and Never Said Robots

Anthropic Wants to Sit Between AI and Machines

Anthropic Aims for a Record IPO, Unitree Up 460%

Your Simulator Has Never Seen a Robot Fail

Looks Like Physics, Isn't Physics, and World Action Models

Popular Podcasts

Black Forest Labs Beat NVIDIA, Figure's Rival Did the Maths

Amodei Says Slow Down, Huang Says No, Figure Leaves the Lab