The Case for Physical AI Safety — LessWrong
It's an exciting time for robotics. Autonomous vehicles shuttle passengers across cities on demand, quadruped and humanoid robots walk on uneven ground with remarkable robustness[4], and robot arms with dexterous hands complete increasingly complex tasks, including using scissors and preparing loose-leaf tea[5]. But the development that has really upended the robotics community is the arrival of robot foundation models (RFMs) like Physical Intelligence's and NVIDIA's GR00T N1. Powered by LLM-like architectures, these models seem poised to finally bring robots into offices and homes. Their development is backed by a rapidly increasing amount of investment: startups developing RFMs have raised at least $7.9B, while those focused on general-purpose humanoid robots have raised at least another $10.8B (Table 1). What's the big deal about RFMs? For decades, progress in robotics meant progress on narrow, special-purpose action policies: a policy that stitches wounds[6], a policy that climbs