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In the last 2 years we’ve seen eye watering robotics funding - e.g., Figure with a ~$39B valuation and $1B+ rounds, Skild AI raising ~$1.4B, Physical Intelligence raising hundreds of millions, and autonomous systems like Wayve’s ~$1.5B robotaxi funding, not to forget Musk with his Optimus bots.
That’s an insane capital wave, but from a core bottleneck POV, what’s actually changed since 2016-2020?
We’ve heard about vision models, RL advances, diffusion policies, better sim, and multimodal embodied models but have any of these really cracked generalization, reliable manipulation, or true sim2real at scale?
Some questions:
1. Are we meaningfully closer to generalist policies that work in messy, real environments?
2. Do “robot foundation models” solve the data bottleneck the way LLMs did for NLP?
3. Has manipulation gone beyond incremental improvements?
4. Are humanoids a technical leap or just a narrative that attracts capital?
5. What are the real research papers/benchmarks showing step-change progress?
Genuinely curious whether we are at a technological inflection point or are we going to hit hard physics/data/hardware problems again.
Is this situation unique to my company or is this true elsewhere as well? What can a senior engineer do to ensure they don't become irrelevant and replaced by cheap freshers?
Apart from enabling seamless communication between our platform and SAP to reduce the manual rework by users of both tools, we have also received requests from customers to duplicate some of the functionality provided by SAP in our platform, so that users can interact with SAP through our platform (which has a much better, modern UI/UX) as opposed to SAP which is a pain for them to use.
While I guess this should be okay as long as the user in our platform is also a user in SAP, I have questions about whether this would be problematic in case this is used by the customer to expand the pool of users that are able to access SAP to do operations - eg. contract or temporary workforce for whom SAP licenses have not been procured. Can someone please guide me regarding the legality of this and whether we can become a target for any legal action from SAP/others?