Will Purvis

chemistry & ml

[Encord @encord_team]

How well do leading VLMs understand the physical world?

Introducing the Encord Egocentric VQA Benchmark, new research from Encord Data Labs comparing VLM performance with professional human annotators.

Built from 1,500 questions on unseen, real-world video, the benchmark reflects the types of scenes and captions we provide to our robotics customers.

Today, humans still lead. A single annotator outperformed Astra, the best model tested, by 8 percentage points. Hybrid human–VLM annotation also showed promise.

One of the most surprising findings was on consensus.

Majority voting across three human annotators improved accuracy by around 5 percentage points, while combining VLMs provided no improvement over the best individual model. In some cases, it actually degraded performance.

Explore the results and implications for Physical AI data development in our latest research article. Link in comments.

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

@paulscherer hark >

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

Sometimes you have to be strategic @syou018

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

@internshipdude Where did you eat though

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

If I had a dollar for every ego data vendor in my LinkedIn DMs I could bootstrap my next startup

[Litian Liang @litian_liang]

Introducing Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME)

A low-cost exoskeleton with real-time haptic torque feedback for learning autonomous policies that perform highly force-mediated, tightly space-constrained, visually occluded, whole-body, and long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks.

Using UME, the teleoperator can unsheathe a heavy metal sword completely blindfolded.

https://t.co/W3PHmYRm4q

🧵1/N

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

Putting calls on this asap

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

@paulscherer special butterfly

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

Spent ~1 month in SF and now my twitter 100% tech bro/startup twitter

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

@shyamalanadkat @OpenAI @SharrockCallum

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

Just saw a waymo in JC??

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

I’m not buying the EA timeline for AGI (gpt 5 I’m looking at you) (4/4)

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

Just got back from a couple weeks working in SF, here are my takeaways (1/4)

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

Everyone and their grandmother is building an AI agent (3/4)

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

cava for lunch in nyc during intern season is not the move

[Will Purvis @WillPurvis13]

dusting the cobwebs off this account. probably time so start using twitter again

[Mikael Thalen @MikaelThalen]

A lawyer using Zoom had to let a judge know that he wasn’t a cat after inadvertently activating a face filter

[Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 @DefenceHQ]

The Band of the Coldstream Guards played ‘We’ll Meet Again’ in London this afternoon, in tribute to Dame Vera Lynn. The Coldstream Guards also provided a ceremonial Guard of Honour for President Macron’s visit to the UK today.

[Reuters @Reuters]

New coronavirus deaths in France sharply down, but cases rise https://t.co/oTiEOLHutW