The Thinking Machine

Vision got robots looking. Language got them reasoning. But the moment a robot has to actually do something with its hands such threading a cable, screw a nut on a bolt, or manipulate a deformable object it can't fully see, touch becomes the missing piece. And touch is one of the hardest unsolved problems in physical AI. In this episode of The Thinking Machine, I sit down with Tao Yu, Director of Dexterous AI Group at Analog Devices, to unpack why ADI is now building a humanoid hand platform wi

Diana Wolf Torres joins The Thinking Machine podcast to break down everything we saw at GTC 2026. Diana is the author of the DROIDS robotics newsletter and the Deep Learning with the Wolf AI newsletter, and we're both NVIDIA-invited creators who have been covering this space together since GTC 2025. We start with what stood out from Jensen's keynote — the shift to measuring tokens per watt, the Vera Rubin chip and why it might make your Blackwell obsolete before you install it, and NVIDIA's tri

Steve Xie spent years leading simulation at Cruise and NVIDIA before founding Lightwheel — and in that time he watched simulation go from a tool that was "great for showcasing to investors" to what he believes will become the core infrastructure layer for all of physical AI. In this episode, we sit down with Steve to break down Lightwheel's three-pillar framework for simulation infrastructure: World, Behavior, and Evaluation — and why getting all three right is what separates serious simulation

Robots can walk. They can dance. They can even do backflips. But can they reliably fold your laundry, make coffee, or recover from mistakes in your kitchen? In this episode, I sit down with robotics researcher Chris Paxton to talk about what’s actually hard about building intelligent robots. We explore: Why robotics today is fundamentally different than it was 10 years ago The rise of world models and robot imagination Why contact and manipulation tasks are harder than navigat

Tolga Kart spent seven years building massive 3D worlds for Call of Duty at Sledgehammer Games. Then he left gaming for Tesla Autopilot, led simulation at Parallel Domain, and now he's the CEO of Third Dimension AI, a company building neural simulators that reconstruct reality from sensor data. In this episode, we dig into SuperSim, Third Dimension's first product, which takes driving logs and reconstructs them into photorealistic 4D environments where robots can train and validate their behavi

In this episode, Jonathan Stephens sits down with Kimate Richards, founder of 10Things, to explore what it really takes to deploy robots safely, reliably, and at scale. With decades of experience across robotics, control systems, and large-scale automation—including firsthand exposure to some of the most complex robotics deployments in the world—Kimate brings a refreshingly practical perspective to an industry often distracted by flashy demos. They unpack why robotics is fundamentally a