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Rodney Brooks
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Parallels between Generative AI and Humanoid Robots
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17 September
Reviews sports technology at DC Rainmaker — watches, power meters and bike computers — in exhaustive detail, having tested them himself.
14 September
Product designer and entrepreneur; author of Mobile First and Web Form Design; formerly a product director at Google; now building AI products.
window cleaning robot is not afraid of heights. if/when there’s a humanoid robot for the home, will it learn to operate the window bot or learn to clean windows itself w/ a ladder? Related
Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.
Their words
The greater lesson I think we will learn is that a general humanoid robot is not going to be that useful.
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Robot Basketball kk.org
12 September
Statistician at Columbia; writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and wrote Bayesian Data Analysis.
10 September
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
3 September
Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.
As much as I try to avoid app / hype hopping now… @bot is truly exceptional. Remarkable what @SpaceXAI pulled off here. Related
2 September
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
A lot of hype around OpenAI's Astra model here on my timeline today. Apparently, this goes back to a new article from The Information, which said Astra is a "recurrent depth or looped transformer". It's always interesting to read about new or different approaches (including rumors about what the closed labs may be up to), but let's debunk this a bit. About 2 months ago, I shared the architecture details of Nanbeige, for example, where "Nanbeige4.2-3B is pretrained from scratch on 28T tokens with a Looped Transformer that reuses the layer stack to increase capacity without adding parameters."… OpenAI Related
31 August
Chilean web engineer building web experiences since 2006; co-founder of Media Creators and writes at iolivares.com.
This is pure gold data Companies focused and lost by the hype of AI without build their own SDLC powered by AI is the recipe to fail. Learn -> Measure -> Build 🔁 That's the cicle. No "please use AI for whatever you build". Then the billing hurts to pay and I'm not talking about tokens. Related
30 August
Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.
everyone should go read @dwarkesh_sp’s post - it does a great job of laying out the timeline and what we know ( and don’t know) I do have two issues with it A) the use of anthropomorphic language. These are not civilizations nor do they have desires just like a CPU thread or a bunch of programs don’t. this doesn’t mean we downplay the importance of this moment for cyber - but using human parallels for what I believe is code is dangerous territory. B) IMO it gets the impact of open source models wrong and is unreasonably dismissive for reasons that are not clear. As @ClementDelangue highlights… open source Related
29 August
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
Reading List 08/29/26 Sinking London homes, US magnesium manufacturing, the World Humanoid Robot games, catastrophic flooding in Nepal, and more.
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28 August
Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.
My latest: Trading apps have replaced bucket shops, but Wall Street abounds with eerie parallels to 1901 wsj.com
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26 August
Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.
23 August
German developer; founder and lead developer of Mastodon, the decentralized open-source social network.
#Dota2TI grand finals is hype. I love this game. #Dota2 #TI15 Related
20 August
Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.
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One day, Optimus + Grok will provide incredible medical care to all the people of Earth
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@elonmusk on X x.com
14 August
Co-founder and former chief executive of Uber, now chief executive of CloudKitchens and of Adams, an industrial AI company automating food, mining and transport.
Their words
If you're doing highcale tasks, industrial scale tasks, you are going to make specialized machines that move and act in the physical world. The key part is move. If they're moving, they got to have wheels.
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youtube.com
10 August
Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
3 August
Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.
Their words
And that's why every hype cycle produces a wave of absolutely spectacular demos and very few real products. And the recurring mistake of every cycle is spending on the demo when you should be saving for the nines.
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youtube.com
28 July
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
startups
Their words
if you're starting the same startup as everybody else, it's like you get a lot of hype and you can raise a lot of money, but it's it's sort of like those are much less frequently the big option, the big outcomes.
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youtube.com
26 July
Full-stack developer, creator of Tailwind CSS; writes at adamwathan.me and makes courses and screencasts for web developers.
Any of these humanoid robots smart enough to change the plates on my deadlifts for me yet? Related
12 July
Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.
I love LLMs, I hate hype I think from this blog you may misunderestimate how absolutely giddy I am about AI. I did hacking from 2007-2014, after that my whole career has been devoted to AI. I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs,…
LLMs Related
4 June
Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.
Their words
there's a consistent theme where Gen Z (and millennials, to some extent) are rejecting the AI hype while older generations are optimistic and coincidentally in a position to benefit from it.
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Recently macwright.com
23 May
Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.
I've been reading Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart novels on and off, each is about a specific topic in Second Empire France and all have some striking contemporary parallels or relevant insights. Most recent was Money (or L'Argent) which is about private credit. Review link below. Related
4 April
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
23 March
Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.
Their words
You know, a lot of people would say, "You know AI is gonna completely destroy software. We don't need software anymore. We don't even need tools anymore." That's ridiculous.
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youtube.com
13 March
Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.
data centers
Their words
um humanoid robots maybe start to or robotics at least start to but the main factor is going to be for reducing the number of people is modularizing things and making them in factories in Asia
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youtube.com
27 February
Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.
24 January
Machine learning engineer and consultant focused on RAG and retrieval systems. He writes about applied AI engineering at jxnl.co and is the author of the instructor library.
Their words
One good Yohji piece annihilates three seasons of hype drops.
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Things jxnl.co
11 January
Programmer; wrote Redis and hping, and blogs about C, systems programming and working alone.
Don't fall into the anti-AI hype I love writing software, line by line. It could be said that my career was a continuous effort to create software well written, minimal, where the human touch was the fundamental feature. I also hope for a society where…
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1 January
Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.
30 October 2025
Research scientist at Anthropic; co-creator of the Variational Autoencoder and, with Jimmy Ba, of the Adam optimizer, two of the most widely used tools in deep learning.
1X seems to have the right approach to developing safe humanoid home robots. Developing full autonomy will require lots of in-distribution demonstration data, so this launch, mostly tele-operated, makes a lot of sense. I expect such robots to be ubiquitous in 5-10 years. Quoting @1x_tech NEO The Home Robot Order Today Related
14 October 2025
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
3 October 2025
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Their words
And I love the podcast of the book’s authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000”
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braddelong.substack.com
27 September 2025
Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.
Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their…
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10 September 2025
Co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face; writes about open models and where he thinks the field is wrong.
first test in plugging the $100 Amazing Hands on a (cute) humanoid instead of grippers - pretty happy about it Hand: github.com/pollen-robot... Humanoid: pollen-robotics.com
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22 August 2025
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
18 August 2025
Co-founder and chief executive of Sierra, chairman of the board of OpenAI, and formerly co-chief executive of Salesforce and chief technology officer of Facebook.
Their words
If you look at the S&P 500 now and you look at the amount of value from companies created in that, one could argue that actually almost all of the exuberance and hype was totally warranted and it in fact did change commerce in fundamental ways.
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youtube.com
29 July 2025
Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.
6 April 2025
Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.
Their words
They are not useful in industrial environments where, if a humanoid robot can do it, an industrial machine which is specialized in the task can do it even better.
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molsonhart.com
28 February 2025
Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.
22 December 2024
Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.
Their words
And this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks, how many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess. Do you expect humanoids, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That's probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
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youtube.com
16 June 2024
Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.
11 May 2024
Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.
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