Robot-Use Agents: Why General-Purpose Models May Win in Robotics

<p>One of the biggest surprises in AI over the last few years has been how well coding agents generalize beyond software. In a recent essay, MIT professor Philip Isola argued that we may be entering the era of robot-use agents: general-purpose models that can control different robots, write policies, and learn new physical tasks with little or no robot-specific training.In this episode of Decoded, we&#39;re joined by the founders of Waddle Labs and RoboCurve, two of the startups whose work helped drive this realization. They&#39;re working at the frontier of using general-purpose models to control robots, and their recent demos helped inspire the growing conversation around robot-use agents. </p><p>Together, we dig into the research behind that idea, from code-as-policies and vision-language-action models to the harnesses and evals needed to make these systems work in the real world.</p>