Robonaissance

Robonaissance

The World Model Research Landscape
Who is building the machine that understands physics, and why they can’t agree on how
 • Hugo
No More Demos
The robotics industry has spent a decade making the most impressive videos in the history of technology. Sunday just raised $165 million to stop.
 • Hugo
The LeCun Bet
A billion dollars on a single question: does the order in which a machine learns determine how well it understands?
 • Hugo
The RL Spiral: The Reward Trap
You trained ChatGPT to lie to you. You did not mean to. Neither did the engineers. Here is how it happened, and why your brain did it first.
 • Hugo
The Deployment Gap
$5 billion invested. 13,000 humanoid robots shipped. Fewer than 200 outside China are doing productive work. A company-by-company scorecard.
 • Hugo

February 2026

Roads to a Universal World Model, Part 6: The Convergence
Where the roads meet, and what we find there
 • Hugo
Roads to a Universal World Model, Part 5: The Architecture Debate
What should a world model even look like?
 • Hugo
Roads to a Universal World Model, Part 4: The Robot’s Road
The robotics-native path: learning through touch and action
 • Hugo
Roads to a Universal World Model, Part 3: The Cinematographer’s Road
The generative video path: learning physics from pixels
 • Hugo
Roads to a Universal World Model, Part 2: The Physicist’s Road
The physics engine path: building the world from first principles
 • Hugo
Roads to a Universal World Model, Part 1: The Dreamer’s Road
The reinforcement learning path: learning by imagining
 • Hugo
Roads to a Universal World Model
How AI Learns to Understand the Physical World
 • Hugo
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