Back in 2025, when I was doing technical AI safety research, I heard a refrain over and over. “Robotics is getting much better.” But I was never quite clear on what that meant.
We’ve all seen AI get much better, very quickly. In the past four years, LLMs have gone from the engaging curiosity that was ChatGPT to agentic systems that have reinvented entire professions and might solve some of humanity’s grand intellectual challenges.
And the whole time, people have been tracking this through benchmarks, revenue figures, and new capabilities. If you understood the scaling laws in 2020, it was almost even possible to see into the future and predict what future systems might bring.
Despite its physical nature, robotics is much harder to understand and track. 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.
It takes a lot to understand the current state of robotics. 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.
Those AI people I talked with are right. Robotics is getting better. 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.
But robotics also deals with the real world, and interacting with the real world is very difficult. It’s taken 15 years for self-driving cars to go from promising demos to mid-scale deployments. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same happens for robots.
So, alongside Tim, my editor at Understanding AI, I’m starting a part-time newsletter to track robotics 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 of robotics, AI, and daily life, and explain why it matters in understandable language.
If that sounds interesting, please click the button below and subscribe to Understanding Robots!