Chris Bentzel

Head of Atlas Software at Boston Dynamics. Lots of work before that.

Interests: Family, Automation, Climate, AI, Business, Biking, Software, History, Skiing

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

Soccer is hockey for people who only want a moderate amount of excitement in their lives.

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

Biked to and from office on Friday - ~60 miles total. Not an everyday plan at 4 hours of commute time, but really enjoyed it.

[The Humanoid Hub @TheHumanoidHub]

"Now that the Atlas enterprise platform is getting to work, the research version gets one last run in the sun."

Farewell to the OG electric Atlas, a true engineering marvel!

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

@demishassabis @BostonDynamics Ditto

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

@nsthorat @jrkelly Yeah, Boston does have a strong robotics cluster.

[Google DeepMind @GoogleDeepMind]

Google DeepMind 🤝 @BostonDynamics

Our new research partnership will bring together our advancements in Gemini Robotics’s foundational capabilities to their new Atlas® humanoids. 🦾

Find out more → https://t.co/Z4fL9ixjW3

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

I don't get the "ChatGPT will kill Google" takes. They have the training data, compute resources, and know how. Great distribution too. Main risk likely fear of fair use implications more than cannibalizing business. Knowledge Panels and Assistant already point this direction.

[Moritz Reuss @moritz_reuss]

VLAs have become the fastest-growing subfield in robot learning. So where are we now?

After reviewing ICLR 2026 submissions and conversations at CoRL, I wrote an overview of the current state of VLA research with some personal takes:
https://t.co/OMMdB1MHtS

[NVIDIA Robotics @NVIDIARobotics]

Working side by side with robots? Safety is key. 🤖

Matt Powers from @BostonDynamics shares his quick take on innovation, policy, and safety best practices.

Full panel recording coming soon. #NVIDIAGTC

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

@adamhfry Minor nit and style choice, but I find the "selected tab" transition animation overly distracting. Much prefer the snappy and subtle UI of Chrome for this.

[Chris Paxton @chris_j_paxton]

Contact-rich manipulation is the correct next frontier for robotics and this is one of the cooler examples around. It's so clear that in the next couple years robots will be dramatically more capable of the kind of challenging, contact-rich tasks that they're currently bad at

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

Advancements on benchmarks like these will be a key step to physical robotic agents.

[alex zhang @a1zhang]

Can GPT, Claude, and Gemini play video games like Zelda, Civ, and Doom II?

𝗩𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼𝗚𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗕𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗵 evaluates VLMs on Game Boy & MS-DOS games given only raw screen input, just like how a human would play. The best model (Gemini) completes just 0.48% of the benchmark!

🧵👇

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

The first large language health model that predicts >1,000 diseases and the time they will occur in a person was just published @Nature, by @MoritzGerstung @artem_shmatko and colleagues https://t.co/31prJJL1v6
This, along with other recent groundbreaking reports, represents the dawn of a new era of primary prevention in medicine

[Michael Lutter @_mlutter]

🚀 Boston Dynamics is growing!

We’re hiring Research Scientists & Engineers to push the limits of humanoid robotics 🤖🧠.

If you’re into reinforcement learning, large-scale physics simulation and dexterous manipulation - we’d love to talk.

1/3

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

Excited to show off our end-to-end learning for whole body manipulation on Atlas, done in collaboration with TRI!

https://t.co/2avrifX9on

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

@DrJimFan https://t.co/hfSD4teKJR

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

Pogacar!!! Tour de France at montmarte - crazy fun.

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

Found our spot

[Chris Bentzel @chrisbentzel]

A few hours before they arrive.