Ankur Deka

Manipulation & RL @Tesla_Optimus | CMU Robotics | Sharing what I learn about robots and ML | Opinions my own

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

I work on humanoid robots, and even I can't keep up with the field anymore.

So I built Observatory — an interactive map of every player in robotics: what they're building, how mature it is, how big they are.

Link in comment. Tell me who's missing, and I'll add 👇

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@cixliv @REK First one

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

10 million intelligent wheeled robots

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Congratulations to the Tesla Team!

10 million vehicles manufactured is an incredible amount of work.

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@elonmusk 10 million intelligent wheeled robots

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

In 2026, I came across a large number of high-quality robotics research papers from Chinese institutes. The growth of robotics hardware companies and their collaboration with universities are likely the main drivers.

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@cdngdev There’s a difference between a demo and a system running in production. Self driving demos have existed since the 1980s. The hard problems being solved by the self driving industry are generalization and reliability over a long tail distribution. Still a cool demo.

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

Once in a while, I write and debug code without AI assistance. Helps me understand what’s going on under the hood.

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@yunta_tsai Wise words

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@asimovinc @IlirAliu_ Exciting!

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

So true. Every generation writes books and develops curriculum so that the next can build on top instead of reinventing the wheel.

[Adam Raudonis @adamraudonis]

Knowledge distillation overtime is the engine of progress for humanity.

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

https://t.co/jqsuFcCOOd

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

Nice blog post on world action models (WAM) from Nvidia
- Rich dynamics prior, compared to VLAs
- Options - inverse dynamics on future video prediction; joint prediction of actions and video; representation only
- Recently more accessible due to compute efficient archs
Link 👇

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@solopribuilds Robot operators, people baby sitting robots

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@sudovatnik Trossen ViperX arms, similar to ALOHA setup

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

Video models’ physics understanding can be leveraged for robotics. Through imagination (WAM), representation (visual backbone) or learnt simulator for eval/training (action conditioned world models). I put a couple of video models to test.

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@Google @reve's model has more hallucinations

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

VEO3 from @Google does a pretty decent job at first glance. Gravity, arms interacting with cardboard, cardboard actually folding.

But it also hallucinates, morphs 2 arms into 3, parallel gripper into claw, cardboard fusing.

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@nikitabier Appreciate it

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@ShuoYangAIR Great to see Beni’s acrobatics @ShuoYangAIR!

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

The world’s servers powering modern companies are built on Linux because it’s open source and secure. Open models would have a similar if not bigger impact.

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[Ankur Deka @_ankurdeka_]

@JensenHuang @nvidia The world’s servers powering modern companies are built on Linux because it’s open source and secure. Open models would have a similar if not bigger impact.