$GENERAL-INSTINCT · Why Robotics Still Isn't Solved - But Could Be Soon | YC Paper Club

episode briefing

extracted intelligence

Y Combinator

Why Robotics Still Isn't Solved - But Could Be Soon | YC Paper Club

2026-08-08 · 4 company · 6 thematic

sentiment

4 bull0 bear0 neu

speakers

bill

Technical background in VLMs and foundation models (worked at Siemens on time series prediction). Co-founded General Instinct to build infrastructure for running physical AI models (world action models, VLAs) fast on edge devices.

marcel

Co-host of itnig live tertulias; focuses on go-to-market strategy and AI adoption in enterprise software; expresses FOMO about speed of AI implementation in sales/marketing.

nico

Co-founder of Default (default.com), providing real-time data layer and semantic modeling for B2B companies to power AI agents. Raised Series A. Previously built inbound scheduling/routing tools for fast-growing startups. Company has logo tattoo culture.

milan ganai

PhD student with Marco Pavone and Clark Barrett at Stanford, currently working at Waymo. Presented RNB encore, a self-supervised bootstrapping framework for discovering embodiment-specific reasoning across manipulation, locomotion, and driving.

quote

“By using our infra, the word action model can runs 500 milliseconds per chunk, which is 16 actions on Jetson store. And we also wrote a full blog about how we did this on our website.”

—bill

now playing · $GENERAL-INSTINCT

$GENERAL-INSTINCTbullish· highbill

General Instinct founders claim 500ms inference for world action models on Jetson via distillation and architecture changes

Bill and Guanming argue world action models (WAMs) are too slow and expensive for robotics (2GB, 200s, $70K) and have built infrastructure optimizing diffusion transformers, VAEs,…

$PHYSICAL-INTELLIGENCEbullish· mediummarcel

Physical Intelligence intern demonstrates MEM system achieving long-horizon tasks and in-context adaptation with memory-augmented VLAs

Marcel presents research from Physical Intelligence showing that adding hierarchical memory (short-term visual + long-term language) to VLAs enables 20+ minute tasks and mistake c…

$RERUNbullish· highnico

Rerun CEO pitches robotics application companies as the new SaaS with data infrastructure as key moat

Nico argues robotics application companies (full-stack, teleop-first, off-the-shelf hardware) will transform the physical economy like SaaS did for software, and Rerun's unified d…

$WAYMObullish· mediummilan ganai

Waymo researcher presents self-supervised bootstrapping for embodied reasoning across manipulation, locomotion, and driving

Milan demonstrates RNB encore, a variational inference framework that discovers embodiment-specific reasoning (move+gripper for manipulation, structural affordances for locomotion…