General Robotics: AI agents for vastly faster robot training

What if deploying a new robot didn't take weeks or months ... but hours?

Ashish Kapoor, founder and CEO of General Robotics and former head of Microsoft's Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group, joins Humanoid Daily to explain why robotics still has a massive research-to-deployment gap.

And he shares how AI agents could help close it.

General Robotics is building GRID, a unified robotics platform designed to bring together robots, simulation, AI models, training, deployment and engineering tools in one place where AI agents can work across the entire stack.

We talk about:

• Cutting robot onboarding from a month to as little as 2 hours

• Using AI agents to engineer and deploy robotic systems

• Why robotics is much harder than agentic software development

• Creating custom robot simulators in minutes

• Why future enterprise robot fleets will include multiple OEMs and form factors

• The three layers of robot training

• Why foundation models could reshape the robot-data race

• Why post-training may ultimately capture much of the value in robotics

Kapoor's big thesis: robotics doesn't just need better AI models. It needs a new engineering architecture that can actually get those models onto real robots in the real world.

00:00 The robotics deployment problem

02:15 Auto Engineering: virtual robot engineers

04:20 Why AI agents are harder in robotics

06:35 What General Robotics built with GRID

09:40 AI-generated robot simulations

11:40 Onboarding almost any robot

14:05 The future of mixed robot fleets

16:15 Where General Robotics fits in the stack

19:10 Why robotics needs a different startup playbook

22:05 The three layers of robot training

25:05 Will foundation models change the robot data race?

28:10 Where the value in robotics will be captured

30:00 Closing thoughts