Can Humanoid Robots Really Go Unsupervised? The Gap Between VLA Hype and Reality

Post was made on 2nd Jan 2026 Who is Brett Adcock and Why Does This Prediction Matter? Brett Adcock isn’t just another tech founder making bold claims on LinkedIn. He’s a serial entrepreneur who previously founded Archer Aviation (an electric air taxi company now publicly traded) and Vettery (a hiring marketplace acquired for $100M+). In 2022, he founded Figure AI with a singular mission: build the world’s first commercially viable humanoid robot. ...

January 2, 2026 · 6 min · 1257 words · Mayur Hulke

Book Review: The Fabric of Reality

So David Deutsch basically looked at all of human knowledge and said “you know what, I think I can tie this all together.” And somehow, he actually pulls it off. The Fabric of Reality isn’t just another physics book. It’s Deutsch’s attempt to show how four completely different areas of knowledge: quantum mechanics, computation, evolution, and epistemology, are actually describing the same underlying reality. It’s like he’s revealing the hidden connections between everything we know about the universe. ...

May 5, 2025 · 3 min · 491 words · Mayur Hulke

Book Review: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

So I thought I had a “decent” handle on “how consciousness and intelligence work”. Then I read Gödel, Escher, Bach and realized I might not know shit :-D. Hofstadter’s basic pitch is wild: consciousness emerges when systems get complex enough to reference themselves. He calls these “strange loops,” like when you point a camera at its own monitor and get that infinite tunnel effect, except somehow that creates you. The book connects three seemingly random things: Gödel’s math proofs that show logical systems can’t fully understand themselves, Escher’s impossible staircases and hands drawing themselves, and Bach’s fugues that loop back on themselves in musical patterns. At first I’m thinking “okay, cool analogies bro,” but then Hofstadter starts building this argument that these aren’t just similar; they’re all examples of the same fundamental process that creates consciousness. ...

April 12, 2025 · 3 min · 519 words · Mayur Hulke

The Intelligence Delusion

The Intelligence Delusion I think We’ve been pursuing only half of intelligence for seventy years. When Alan Turing proposed his famous test in 1950, he made a brilliant and practical choice. Faced with the impossible question of “what is consciousness?”, he focused on something measurable: could a machine engage in conversation sophisticated enough to fool a human judge? It was an elegant solution to a philosophical problem that had no clear answer. ...

February 23, 2025 · 8 min · 1569 words · Mayur Hulke

Are Generalist AI Models the Future of Robot Learning?

Reinforcement learning (RL) has led to impressive robot demos, but deploying these controllers in the real world remains challenging. Training a policy in simulation is one thing, making it work reliably on a physical robot is another. The hidden costs include months of fine-tuning, poor generalization across tasks, and an unpredictable trial-and-error process. Credit: π0: First Generalist Policy by Physical Intelligence (π) A recent paper on π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control introduces a foundation model for robotics, designed to overcome these limitations. Instead of training separate RL policies for each task, π0 is pre-trained on over 10,000 hours of diverse robot data across multiple platforms and 68 tasks. It builds on pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to incorporate internet-scale knowledge, allowing it to follow language instructions and generalize more effectively to new scenarios. ...

February 13, 2025 · 6 min · 1150 words · Mayur Hulke