NitroGen just won CVPR Best Paper Honorable Mention!! We are making strides towards general-purpose embodied agents that master not only the real world physics, but also all possible physics across a multiverse of simulations. It’s been 4 years since MineDojo, our first embodied agent in Minecraft, won NeurIPS Best Paper. Congrats to everyone on the team!!

I promise this will be the best 20 min you spend today! Robotics: Endgame, the sequel to my last year's Sequoia AI Ascent talk, "Physical Turing Test". I laid out the roadmap for solving Physical AGI as a simple parallel to the LLM success story. Be a good scientist, copy homework ;) And stay till the end, more easter eggs and predictions for your polymarket! 00:30 DGX-1 origin story at OpenAI, I was there in 2016 signing with Jensen and Elon. Heading to the Computer History Museum! 01:42 The Great Parallel 03:31 Robotics, the Endgame 03:39 Why VLAs fall short 04:32 Video world models as the 2nd pretraining paradigm 06:09 World Action Models (WAM) 07:46 Strategies for robot data collection and the FSD equivalent to physical data flywheel for robot manipulation 11:06 EgoScale and the Dexterity Scaling Law we discovered recently 14:00 Physical RL: bridging the last mile 15:39 DreamDojo: an end-to-end neural physics engine for scaling RL in silico 17:00 Civilizational Technology Tree and my predictions for the near future. Spoiler: it's closer than you think. Thanks to my friends at Sequoia for inviting me back to AI Ascent this year! I had a blast! Last year's talk is attached in the thread if you missed it.

The Physical Turing Test, May 2025 at Sequoia AI Ascent youtube.com/watch?v=_2NijXqB…

The power of the Claw, in the palm of a robot hand. Agentic robotics is here! Today, we open-source CaP-X: vibe agents, alive in the physical world. They incarnate as robot arms and humanoids with a rich set of perception APIs, actuation APIs, and auto synthesize skill libraries as they go. CaP-X is a strict superset of our old stack, because policies like VLAs are “just” API calls as well. It solves many tasks zero-shot that a learned policy would struggle with. And we are doing much more than vibing. CaP-X is our most systematic, scientific study on agentic robotics so far: - We build a comprehensive agentic toolkit: perception (SAM3 segmentation, Molmo pointing, depth, point cloud), control (IK solvers, grasp planner, navigation), and visualization (EEF, mask overlays) that work across different robots. - CaP-Gym: LLM’s first Physical Exam! 187 manipulation tasks across RoboSuite, LIBERO-PRO, and BEHAVIOR. Tabletop, bimanual, mobile manipulation. Sim and real. Can’t wait to see the gradients flow from CaP-Gym to the next wave of frontier LLM releases. - CaP-Bench: we benchmark 12 frontier LLMs/VLMs (Gemini, GPT, Opus, Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, and more) across 8 evaluation tiers. We systematically vary API abstraction level, agentic harness, and visual grounding methods. Lots of insights in our paper. - CaP-Agent0: a training-free agentic harness that matches or exceeds human expert code on 4 out of 7 tasks without task-specific tuning. - CaP-RL: if you get a gym, you get RL ;). A 7B OSS model jumps from 20% to 72% success after only 50 training iterations. The synthesized programs transfer to real robots with minimal sim-to-real gap. 3 years ago, our team created Voyager, one of the earliest agentic AI that plays and learns in Minecraft continuously. Its key ideas — skill libraries, self-reflection loops, and in-context planning — have since influenced many modern agentic designs. Today, the agent graduates from Minecraft and gets a real job. It’s April Fool’s, but this Claw is getting its hands dirty for real! Link in thread:

As usual, we open-source everything, MIT license: capgym.github.io Code: github.com/capgym/cap-x Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.22435 CaP-X is brought to you by NVIDIA, Berkeley, Stanford, and CMU. I'd like to thank the legend @Ken_Goldberg who co-advised the work, and the team who poured their hearts into it!

We trained a humanoid with 22-DoF dexterous hands to assemble model cars, operate syringes, sort poker cards, fold/roll shirts, all learned primarily from 20,000 hours of egocentric human video with no robot in the loop. Humans are the most scalable embodiment on the planet. We discovered a near-perfect log-linear scaling law (R² = 0.998) between human video volume and action prediction loss, and this loss directly predicts real-robot success rate. Humanoid robots will be the end game, because they are the practical form factor with minimal embodiment gap from humans. Call it the Bitter Lesson of robot hardware: the kinematic similarity lets us simply retarget human finger motion onto dexterous robot hand joints. No learned embeddings, no fancy transfer algorithms needed. Relative wrist motion retargeted 22-DoF finger actions serve as a unified action space that carries through from pre-training to robot execution. Our recipe is called "EgoScale": - Pre-train GR00T N1.5 on 20K hours of human video, mid-train with only 4 hours (!) of robot play data with Sharpa hands. 54% gains over training from scratch across 5 highly dexterous tasks. - Most surprising result: a *single* teleop demo is sufficient to learn a never-before-seen task. Our recipe enables extreme data efficiency. - Although we pre-train in 22-DoF hand joint space, the policy transfers to a Unitree G1 with 7-DoF tri-finger hands. 30% gains over training on G1 data alone. The scalable path to robot dexterity was never more robots. It was always us. Deep dives in thread:

This is a huge team work at NVIDIA Robotics. Check out @ruijie_zheng12's deep dive: - Website: research.nvidia.com/labs/gea… - Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.16710 x.com/ruijie_zheng12/status/…

What can half of GPT-1 do? We trained a 42M transformer called SONIC to control the body of a humanoid robot. It takes a remarkable amount of subconscious processing for us humans to squat, turn, crawl, sprint. SONIC captures this "System 1" - the fast, reactive whole-body intelligence - in a single model that translates any motion command into stable, natural motor signals. And it's all open-source!! The key insight: motion tracking is the one, true scalable task for whole body control. Instead of hand-engineering rewards for every new skill, we use dense, frame-by-frame supervision from human mocap data. The data itself encodes the reward function: "configure your limbs in any human-like position while maintaining balance". We scaled humanoid motion RL to an unprecedented scale: 100M mocap frames and 500,000 parallel robots across 128 GPUs. NVIDIA Isaac Lab allows us to accelerate physics at 10,000x faster tick, giving robots many years of virtual experience in only hours of wall clock time. After 3 days of training, the neural net transfers zero-shot to the real G1 robot with no finetuning. 100% success rate across 50 diverse real-world motion sequences. One SONIC policy supports all of the following: - VR whole-body teleoperation - Human video. Just point a webcam to live stream motions. - Text prompts. "Walk sideways", "dance like a monkey", "kick your left foot", etc. - Music audio. The robot dances to the beat, adapting to tempo and rhythm. - VLA foundation models. We plugged in GR00T N1.5 and achieved 95% success on mobile tasks. We open-source the code and model checkpoints!! Deep dive in thread:

Website: nvlabs.github.io/GEAR-SONIC/ Codebase and weights: github.com/NVlabs/GR00T-Whol… Whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.07820 Check out @zhengyiluo's post: x.com/zhengyiluo/status/2024…

Announcing DreamDojo: our open-source, interactive world model that takes robot motor controls and generates the future in pixels. No engine, no meshes, no hand-authored dynamics. It's Simulation 2.0. Time for robotics to take the bitter lesson pill. Real-world robot learning is bottlenecked by time, wear, safety, and resets. If we want Physical AI to move at pretraining speed, we need a simulator that adapts to pretraining scale with as little human engineering as possible. Our key insights: (1) human egocentric videos are a scalable source of first-person physics; (2) latent actions make them "robot-readable" across different hardware; (3) real-time inference unlocks live teleop, policy eval, and test-time planning *inside* a dream. We pre-train on 44K hours of human videos: cheap, abundant, and collected with zero robot-in-the-loop. Humans have already explored the combinatorics: we grasp, pour, fold, assemble, fail, retry—across cluttered scenes, shifting viewpoints, changing light, and hour-long task chains—at a scale no robot fleet could match. The missing piece: these videos have no action labels. So we introduce latent actions: a unified representation inferred directly from videos that captures "what changed between world states" without knowing the underlying hardware. This lets us train on any first-person video as if it came with motor commands attached. As a result, DreamDojo generalizes zero-shot to objects and environments never seen in any robot training set, because humans saw them first. Next, we post-train onto each robot to fit its specific hardware. Think of it as separating "how the world looks and behaves" from "how this particular robot actuates." The base model follows the general physical rules, then "snaps onto" the robot's unique mechanics. It's kind of like loading a new character and scene assets into Unreal Engine, but done through gradient descent and generalizes far beyond the post-training dataset. A world simulator is only useful if it runs fast enough to close the loop. We train a real-time version of DreamDojo that runs at 10 FPS, stable for over a minute of continuous rollout. This unlocks exciting possibilities: - Live teleoperation *inside* a dream. Connect a VR controller, stream actions into DreamDojo, and teleop a virtual robot in real time. We demo this on Unitree G1 with a PICO headset and one RTX 5090. - Policy evaluation. You can benchmark a policy checkpoint in DreamDojo instead of the real world. The simulated success rates strongly correlate with real-world results - accurate enough to rank checkpoints without burning a single motor. - Model-based planning. Sample multiple action proposals → simulate them all in parallel → pick the best future. Gains 17% real-world success out of the box on a fruit packing task. We open-source everything!! Weights, code, post-training dataset, eval set, and whitepaper with tons of details to reproduce. DreamDojo is based on NVIDIA Cosmos, which is open-weight too. 2026 is the year of World Models for physical AI. We want you to build with us. Happy scaling! Links in thread:

- Project website: dreamdojo-world.github.io/ - Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.06949 - Code repo and model ckpts: github.com/NVIDIA/DreamDojo This is a huge team work at NVIDIA. All credits go to the wonderful teams who poured their hearts into it!