how we accidentally solved robotics by watching 1 million hours of YouTube
29 Jun, 2025
the existential crisis we all share
imagine this: you've just spent $640 billion training the chonkiest language model known to humanity (lol) and decide to call it "Behemoth". it can annoy you on whatsapp, try to solve calculus, and argue with you about anything with a sophistication of a philosophy PhD.
but ask it to grab a coffee mug from your kitchen counter? ngmi
turns out scaling LLMs forever still leaves robots as clueless. internet-scale language misses the fundamental physics of stuff actually moving around in 3D space. and no amount of "think step by step" or COT prompting helps to teach your chatterbox where the trash is in the kitchen
but if i told you that the solution was hiding in plain sight? what if the secret sauce wasn't more tokens, but more... videos?
the "why didn't we think of this sooner" moment
here's the thing everyone forgot while we were busy making ai agents book flight tickets: robots need to understand physics, not language.
so enter V-JEPA 2, which basically said "hey, what if we fed a neural network 1 million hours of youtube and taught it to predict what happens next?" except instead of predicting the next word, it predicts the next moment in reality.
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