Sergey Levine: Current State of Humanoid Robotics, China & Future Predictions

Sergey Levine is one of the world's top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence. We talked about where humanoid robotics is today, thoughts on the Chinese robotics ecosystem, and his predictions for future timelines.

• My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/

• The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

Podcast links:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/9OSbaPjv0Rc

• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835

• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/sergey-levine-current-state-of-humanoid?r=n49ky

Thank you to this episode's sponsor for supporting my work:

• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(00:37) Where are we today

(04:20) Most surprising capabilities so far

(07:03) The most inspiring real world robotics

(08:36) If OpenAI or Anthropic got into robotics

(10:22) Chinese robotics

(13:15) Will one lab breakout from the rest

(16:59) Thoughts on a concrete roadmap

(21:03) Generalization and demonstrating it

(26:04) Types of data and which is best for robotics

(34:34) Why humanoid robotics differs from Waymo

(37:10) If humanoid robotics failed here is why

(39:55) Are there hot take modeling architectures in robotics

(42:05) Thoughts on AI safety in robotics

(46:44) Top robotics research paper recommendation

(49:35) Why is Boston Dynamics less top of mind

(53:47) Advice for his younger self

(56:42) Outro

Where to find Sergey:

• Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8R35rCwAAAAJ&hl=en

• Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~svlevine/

• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Levine

• X/Twitter: https://x.com/svlevine?lang=en

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergey-levine-5a31a24/

Where to find Ryan:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/

• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/

• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman

• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

Referenced in this episode:

• Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware (ALOHA / ACT paper): https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13705

• Emergence of Human to Robot Transfer in Vision-Language-Action Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22414

• Summary of human to robot paper: https://www.pi.website/research/human_to_robot