
Sergey Levine: Current State of Humanoid Robotics, China & Future Predictions
Sergey Levine is one of the world's top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence. We talked about where humanoid robotics is today, thoughts on the Chinese robotics ecosystem, and his predictions for future timelines. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ • The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done Podcast links: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/9OSbaPjv0Rc • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 • Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/sergey-levine-current-state-of-humanoid?r=n49ky Thank you to this episode's sponsor for supporting my work: • WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/ Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (00:37) Where are we today (04:20) Most surprising capabilities so far (07:03) The most inspiring real world robotics (08:36) If OpenAI or Anthropic got into robotics (10:22) Chinese robotics (13:15) Will one lab breakout from the rest (16:59) Thoughts on a concrete roadmap (21:03) Generalization and demonstrating it (26:04) Types of data and which is best for robotics (34:34) Why humanoid robotics differs from Waymo (37:10) If humanoid robotics failed here is why (39:55) Are there hot take modeling architectures in robotics (42:05) Thoughts on AI safety in robotics (46:44) Top robotics research paper recommendation (49:35) Why is Boston Dynamics less top of mind (53:47) Advice for his younger self (56:42) Outro Where to find Sergey: • Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8R35rCwAAAAJ&hl=en • Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~svlevine/ • Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Levine • X/Twitter: https://x.com/svlevine?lang=en • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergey-levine-5a31a24/ Where to find Ryan: • Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/ • X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/ • Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman • TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman Referenced in this episode: • Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware (ALOHA / ACT paper): https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13705 • Emergence of Human to Robot Transfer in Vision-Language-Action Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22414 • Summary of human to robot paper: https://www.pi.website/research/human_to_robot


















