There is a slight nuance with the definition

There is a slight nuance with the definition of general-purpose robotics. We’re really focused on general-purpose methods. Some methods can be applied to both industrial or home robots or sidewalk robots, with all of those different embodiments and form factors. We’re not predicated on there being a general-purpose embodiment that does everything for you, more than if you have an embodiment that is very bespoke for your problem. It’s fine. We can quickly fine-tune it into solving the problem that you have, specifically. So this is a big question: Will general-purpose robots happen? That’s something a lot of people are tossing around hypotheses about, if and when it will happen.

 

Thus far there’s been more success with bespoke robots. I think, to some extent, the technology has not been there to enable more general-purpose robots to happen. Whether that’s where the business mode will take us is a very good question. I don’t think that question can be answered until we have more confidence in the technology behind it. That’s what we’re driving right now. We’re seeing more signs of life — that very general approaches that don’t depend on a specific embodiment are plausible. The latest thing we’ve done is this RTX project. We went around to a number of academic labs — I think we have 30 different partners now — and asked to look at their task and the data they’ve collected. Let’s pull that into a common repository of data, and let’s train a large model on top of it and see what happens.