# Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/fully-autonomous-robots-are-much-closer-than-you-think-sergey-levine
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/fully-autonomous-robots-are-much-closer-than-you-think-sergey-levine.md
Podcast: [Dwarkesh Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast)
Published: 2025-09-12T15:03:02+00:00
Episode link: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sergey-levine
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/173427890/41edf014292b368eebd99d78a2882c3c.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/dwarkesh-podcast/episodes/fully-autonomous-robots-are-much-closer-than-you-think-sergey-levine
Duration seconds: 5308

## Resource

Sergey Levine , one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence , thinks we’re on the cusp of a “self-improvement flywheel” for general-purpose robots. His median estimate for when robots will be able to run households entirely autonomously? 2030. If Sergey’s right, the world 5 years from now will be an insanely different place than it is today. This conversation focuses on understanding how we get there: we dive into foundation models for robotics, and how we scale both the data and the hardware necessary to enable a full-blown robotics explosion. Watch on YouTube ; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . Sponsors * Labelbox provides high-quality robotics training data across a wide range of platforms and tasks. From simple object handling to complex workflows, Labelbox can get you the data you need to scale your robotics research. Learn more at labelbox.com/dwarkesh * Hudson River Trading uses cutting-edge ML and terabytes of historical market data to predict future prices. I got to try my hand at this fascinating prediction problem with help from one of HRT’s senior researchers. If you’re curious about how it all works, go to hudson-trading.com/dwarkesh * Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (aka nano banana) isn’t just for generating fun images — it’s also a powerful tool for restoring old photos and digitizing documents. Test it yourself in the Gemini App or in Google’s AI Studio: ai.studio/banana To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise . Timestamps (00:00:00) – Timeline to widely deployed autonomous robots (00:17:25) – Why robotics will scale faster than self-driving cars (00:27:28) – How vision-language-action models work (00:45:37) – Changes needed for brainlike efficiency in robots (00:57:59) – Learning from simulation (01…

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