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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 1d

I keep saying it. It's about reliability.

"So far the public has only been able to assess their capabilities via nicely-shot YouTube videos and company blog posts. My reporting indicates that Figure’s robots are not quite as reliable as those media might have you believe."

time.com/7325486/figu...

What I Learned Watching a Humanoid Robot Do Laundry

Inside Figure AI's bold bet on humanoid robots

time.com

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 1d

Thank you so much!!! ☺️

Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 1d

My 2025 Humanoid Robots talk is now up.

Here I highlight and explain major humanoid news items from the past year, from the robot Olympics to robot bartenders.

youtu.be/dtGsw3hJtZI?...

This Year in Humanoid Robot News 2025

YouTube video by Christian Hubicki

youtu.be

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 2d

Here’s the full length video from Unitree Robotics.

youtu.be/O5GphCrjx98?...

Unitree G1 Kungfu Kid V6.0

YouTube video by Unitree Robotics

youtu.be

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 2d

Incredible.

Humanoids are now *extremely* good at imitating human motion while balancing.

It’s called “motion retargeting”. It burst onto the humanoids scene just two years ago. Now it’s everywhere. It’s limited to preset choreography (it’s not improvising the moves) but it makes fantastic demos.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 2d

Congratulations!

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 3d

Original scientific article preprint.

arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06105

arxiv.org

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 3d

“Our findings highlight how market-driven optimization pressures can systematically erode alignment, creating a race to the bottom”

Sounds bad.

Large language models are sloppy messes inside. I’m not surprised they can easily contort to deceptively market, disinform, and promote harmful behaviors.

Seamus Blackley @seamus.bsky.social · 3d

futurism.com/future-socie...

New Paper Finds That When You Reward AI for Success on Social Media, It Becomes Increasingly Sociopathic

Stanford scientists unleashed AI bots in different environments, including social media, and they started behaving unethically.

futurism.com

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 3d

Oh wow. I learned about the “Gish Gallop” from Eugenie Scott, but I had no idea she coined the phrase.

Gish Gallop is a debate tactic where Dwayne Gish rattled off so many misleading points his opponents could never respond to them all.

Now it’s common parlance in online debate culture.

Glenn Branch @glennbranch.bsky.social · 4d

Lexicographic enshrinement for Eugenie C. Scott's coinage "Gish Gallop"! @eugeniescott.bsky.social

Gish gallop

Gish gallop (sometimes gish gallop or Gish/gish galloping) refers to a rhetorical technique or strategy by which a debater puts forth too many false arguments for their opponent to be able to refute i...

www.merriam-webster.com

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 4d

But generally it’s a tight form factor that can get around in all sorts of environments while doing real work and carrying payloads.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 4d

It’s a super recent explosion of interest. I’m about to release my This Year in Humanoids 2025 talk to YouTube. I’ll be sure to link it here and comment in the replies.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 5d

Waterproof humanoid from Deep Robotics.

Neat but very "cart before the horse." Transparently so.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 5d

I think 1X is saying Figure is specifically ripping off their cloth skin aesthetic. And earlier Figure accused Boston Dynamics of taking their humanoid hip joint design. And Boston Dynamics accused another company of taking their quadruped leg design... and on and on.

But yes, the designs converge.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

In the episode you’re describing, SG1 gives military aid to Jaffa rebels and they call the staff a weapon of intimidation. Makes sense. The Goa’uld are lazy tyrants.

But there’s another episode with the Asgard where Thor calls Carter to help with their replicator problem and is like “Bullets? 🤯”

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

In one episode, the leader of the most advanced technological alien race in the galaxy basically says “we would have never thought of bullets.”

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

One of my favorite through lines was how aliens with spaceships and laser weapons were amazed by the lethality of Belgian-made submachine guns. Relatable.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

Good transparency from the CEO, but this is mostly shade thrown at Tesla.

Figure's Blog post:
www.figure.ai/news/introdu...

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

New humanoid dropped this morning. Figure 03.

Pretty video. Pretty robot. Very pretty demo.

How reliable? How reliable? How reliable? As far as I'm concerned that's the whole ballgame.
youtu.be/Eu5mYMavctM?...

Introducing Figure 03

YouTube video by Figure

youtu.be

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

Humanoid company CEO throwing shade.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

I’ve heard this from my colleagues. Their students don’t use subfolders.

Very sad. Discovering I could organize my own folder hierarchy was a formative joy of my childhood.

Micah Corah @micahcorah.bsky.social · 6d

So, I know the kids all ignore folder hierarchy these days... But "save as" on Microsoft Office no longer defaults to the initial file location?

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

Agreed on SGU. Stargate overall was fun. The end of Atlantis was a watershed moment for me. I finally understood what it meant for a show to be “bad.”

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

GenZ keeps scrolling TikTok and not raising the shields.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 6d

Every couple of years, I remember the hilarity of the Stargate science fiction universe.

On a supposed modern-day Earth, the 5 UN security council nations build an interstellar military armada, obliterate every alien adversary across two galaxies, in secret, before we have iPhones.

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Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 7d

Here's a link to the paper and videos put out publicly by Shi and Song's groups at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford respectively.

"UMI-on-Air: Embodiment-Aware Guidance for Embodiment-Agnostic Visuomotor Policies"
Gupta et al.
arxiv.org/abs/2510.02614
umi-on-air.github.io

UMI on Air: Embodiment-Aware Guidance for Embodiment-Agnostic Visuomotor Policies

Not all robots are equally UMI-able - they can't all track UMI trajectories perfectly. Our key idea: allow the robot's controller to steer UMI's diffusion policy, leading to more robust cross-embodime...

umi-on-air.github.io

Christian Hubicki @chubicki.bsky.social · 7d

New result: a drone that can screw on a lightbulb

But it's more than that. Right now, the best robot hand controllers work very differently than our best locomotion controllers--they don't coordinate very well.

Seems like a good step toward making them work together, and for more than just flying.

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