Bankless · Monday, August 31, 2026
Shahin Farshchi points to the growing availability of open-source AI models, like those from Physical Intelligence, as a significant enabler for robotics. He explains that these models allow even students to fine-tune robots for specific tasks, a process that previously required extensive resources and expertise, thus democratizing robotics development.
“If you fast forward to today, you have companies like Physical Intelligence that we invested in that are building models that specialize in various unstructured tasks. And they're putting many of those models on open source repositories for roboticists to use and fine tune for their individual use cases.”
“This is extremely powerful and a huge enabler for the community. that didn't exist until very recently.”
“So what would have required many PhDs and millions of dollars of funding and many years now can be achieved by an undergraduate student, maybe even a high school student, downloading and installing one of these models and fine tuning the robot to perform a specific task.”