flâneur

Robotics evals should test hardware, not just software

techstatecraft.substack.com · 2,395 words · saved by 1 readers

Measuring the hardware overhang

A robot competing in the dexterous-hand competition at the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games. Source: AGIBOT. I recently wrote about how frontier AI progress might generalize to robotics progress, leading to a rapid improvement in robot control capabilities. If frontier-AI progress substantially accelerated advances in robot control, true robot capabilities might be limited by robotic hardware – how precisely finger joints can move regardless of the digital inputs they receive, for example – rather than by software. It’d therefore be useful to know what capabilities robotic hardware could…

saved by

related reading