Jonathan Stephens

The Thinking Machine

Technology EN ↓ 6 episodes

We’re entering a new era in robotics. One where the bottleneck isn’t just algorithms, it’s the entire stack. The foundation models, the data pipelines, the simulation environments, the training infrastructure. All of it has to come together for robots to move from demos to deployment. The Thinking Machine Podcast goes deep with the researchers, founders, and engineers working across this stack. That means conversations with teams building robotics foundation models like Groot and Gemini Robotics, architects of world models and neural simulators, and the people designing the data collection sys...

Author

Jonathan Stephens

Episodes

Why Touch Is the Missing Piece in Robotics with Tao Yu 07.05.2026 59:40

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...

Physical AI and Robotics at NVIDIA GTC 2026 with Diana Wolf Torres 16.04.2026 1:33:25

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 Ve...

How Lightwheel is Building the Simulation Infrastructure of Physical AI with Steve Xie 14.03.2026 53:26

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: Wor...

Why Robotics Is Harder Than It Looks with Chris Paxton 24.02.2026 50:29

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...

Modeling the Real World with Tolga Kart 10.02.2026 51:11

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 rec...

Building the Android OS for Robotics with Kimate Richards 01.02.2026 1:31:56

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...