Sergey Levine

It's just an argument for 2025 being a better year than 2009.

But there's also other things about robotics that are a bit different than driving.

Like in some ways, robotic manipulation is a much, much harder problem.

But in other ways, it's a problem space where it's easier to get rolling, to start that flywheel with a more limited scope.

So to give you an example,

If you're learning how to drive, you would probably be pretty crazy to learn how to drive on your own without somebody helping you.

Like, you would not trust your teenage child to learn to drive just on their own, just drop them in the car and say, like, go for it.

And that's like a, you know, a 16-year-old who's had a significant amount of time to learn about the world.

You would never even dream of putting a 5-year-old in a car and tell him to get started.

But if you want somebody to, like, clean the dishes – like, dishes can break too, but you would probably be okay with a child trying to do the dishes –

without somebody constantly like, you know, sitting next to them with a break, so to speak.

For a lot of tasks that we want to do with robotic manipulation, there's potential to make mistakes and correct those mistakes.

And when you make a mistake and correct it, well, first you've achieved the task because you've corrected, but you've also gained knowledge that allows you to avoid that mistake in the future.

With driving, because of the dynamics of how it's set up, it's very hard to make a mistake, correct it, and then learn from it because the mistakes themselves have significant ramifications.

Now, not all manipulation tests are like that.

There are truly some, like, very safety-critical stuff.

And this is where the next thing comes in, which is common sense.

Common sense, meaning the ability to make inferences about what might happen that are reasonable guesses, but that do not require you to experience that mistake and learn from it in advance.

That's tremendously important, and that's something that we basically had no idea how to do about five years ago.

But now, you...