About Understanding Robots
LLMs have improved dramatically since Thanksgiving 2022, from the engaging curiosity that was ChatGPT to agentic systems that have reinvented entire professions and threaten to solve some of humanity’s intellectual challenges. Yet for most people, AI is something that still exists in a computer screen.
The place where AI might profoundly affect the real world — for good and ill — is robotics.
Robotics is accelerating in investment and capabilities. On Twitter every day, there’s a steady drumbeat of announcements. New companies. New fundraising. New capabilities. Over the past five years, we’ve seen the birth and explosion in humanoid robots, new types of AI models controlling robots, even new contenders in the nominally boring bits of the actuator supply chain.
Yet for all its hype and all its importance, robotics is a surprisingly difficult subject to parse. As one interviewee told me, robotics is “fifteen fields in a trench coat.” To build a good robot, a company must figure out AI development, software, hardware, operations, regulatory barriers. The list goes on. And much of the existing writing either aims toward a completely general audience or assumes a lot of prior knowledge.
Over the past 10 months, I’ve traveled to New York, San Francisco and even China to see robots and learn more about the industry. I’ve talked with dozens of roboticists and, alongside Timothy B. Lee, I wrote a five part series on robotics at Understanding AI in September.
Now I’m starting a part-time newsletter to share that expertise in a more focused space. I won’t cover every new development in robotics; nor will I necessarily write about the big story of the week. But I aim, once a week or so, to write a story about something that’s happening in the intersection robotics, AI, and daily life, and explain why it matters in understandable language.
Tim will also be an occasional contributor, focusing mainly on autonomous vehicles — a field he has covered for the last decade.
If that sounds interesting, please click here and subscribe to Understanding Robots.
About Kai Williams
I’m a full-time reporter at Understanding AI, which is a newsletter that explores how AI works and how it's changing our world. I’ve reported on new models, how mathematics are responding, and the economics of the AI boom.
If you’d like to reach out to me, feel free to message me on Signal at kai_williams.48.
