Machine Learning Street Talk · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Shawn Wen uses the example of a robot needing to pull a beer to illustrate the difficulty of physical world tasks for AI, likening it to the Wozniak coffee cup challenge. He contrasts this with the digital world where models are well-trained for text and tool usage, noting that physical world data is scarce, making robotics and tasks like pulling a beer exceptionally hard.
“The intelligence here is not really about reasoning. It's really about adaptation.”
“I want the bot to be able to pull a beer for me. That's the test number one. I was like, oh wow, okay. Well, because it's just really, really hard.”
“all the tools it's all you know about how to use the computers right so i think now we are we have trained the model to really good at understanding text and understand how to use tools in that virtual world but in the physical world the data is still very very little and that applies to robotics”