Pete Florence

“Co-founder and CEO of Generalist. Former researcher at Google where he worked on foundational vision-language-action models and helped build Pomi, one of the first multimodal language models used as a robot brain.”

“"We have a very general purpose recipe. And to be honest, it doesn't even really necessarily matter too much what the x-axis is other than like the x-axis is something that we can continually do more of. And the y-axis is some measure of how good the robots are. And we see that we can just continue to pour in more and more effort on that x-axis and the y-axis continues to get better and better."”

“"Every time you try and think, oh, I'm just going to have this narrow little model in this one little domain. And that's going to be my little niche. And then the general models will do other things but not my thing. That's not a bad long term that we think is the right one to take."”

“"The most powerful way is to just take the language model and make sure it is a multimodal language model... And then we just made the whole thing directly, like the brain of the robot rather than some type of engineered system."”

“"For the next generation of robotics, some of the, you know, it is going to be a long journey in some ways for certain levels of just like full capabilities. Yet at the same time, there's a lot of robots that can be shipped to do things that are not as dangerous to humans as driving on the public roads, right?"”

“As we add more and more general physical data, all tasks work better. And we can predictably improve with computing data, and we also see strong scaling in model size. And if we just swap the word physical for text, this is the type of strong scaling that underpinned the arrival and coming of age of the GPT-3 and beyond era in language models.”

“A little product called ChatGPT, GPT 3.5 and 4 over at OpenAI.”

“Apart from some of my prior work back at Google, we know we can take internet scale data, we can gather it all up, and we can create a model.”

“Gen Zero is an embodied foundation model that really scales with physical interaction.”