PF

Pete Florence

Things Pete Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Pete Florence has been a guest on Joe Lonsdale , The Generalist , The Generalist and The Gradient .

Recently: “Pete Florence: When Robots Improvise” on The Generalist (October 2026); “Pete Florence: When Robots Improvise” on The Generalist (October 2026); “Ep 161: Generalist CEO Pete Florence on the Robot Revolution & Bringing General Intelligence to the Physical World” on Joe Lonsdale (August 2026); “Pete Florence: Dense Visual Representations, NeRFs, and LLMs for Robotics” on The Gradient (January 2023).

What They Said

“If you're not touching and moving the world and you're a robot, what are you doing? … If you don't touch and move the world, you're basically just moving a sensor around. And if you're moving a sensor around and you're not touching the world, well, you could use a drone, and drones work pretty well today. … But then in a lot of other cases, you could often just tape that sensor to a wall.” — Pete Florence, The Generalist

Asked what robotics' equivalent of coding will be, the use case that drives everything else, Florence says dexterity. A robot that only looks around, he argues, is doing a job a drone or a fixed camera already does.

The Generalist · 2026-10-20 Permalink → Listen →
The Generalist Around 45:21 into the episode
Pete Florence

…that actually unlock commercial value. And certainly deploying is useful. But ideally, of course, we're deploying a very general intelligence that can also achieve very deep levels of mastering a particular task rather than just a very narrow intelligence that only masters like one specific task.

Mario Gabriele

…loop. When it comes to physical intelligence, Intelligence. Do you think, do you have an intuition of what that killer use case might be? Is there an analogy there that works where you think folding things or some task will sort of be the equivalent sort of first driver of a lot of this demand? I

Pete Florence

…that has taken off as well, which is there is a little bit of an actual sort of self-improvement with story. And that if we can really crack dexterity, then the robots can build the robots and the robots can start building next generation of robots, et cetera. But I also just think intuitively, like, you know, software creates a lot of value. And that's why coding is very useful. And similarly, if you're not touching and moving the world and you're a robot, what are you doing? If you don't touch the role at all, what can you do? And I would say, for all intents and purposes, if you don't touch and move the world, you're basically just moving a sensor around. Okay. And then let's, no, let's keep thinking about this. So if you're moving a sensor around and you're not touching the world, well, you could use a drone and drones work pretty well today. So like, you know…

Mario Gabriele

And you could put one on a

Speaker 3

different wall, and that would be a lot of a

Pete Florence

cheaper solution to cover that area. So like there's applications and deploying robots to go inspect valves. And I always wonder myself, like, why don't you just set up a tripod with a camera to look at that valve all day? But inspection is a great use case in certain cases. But there's just one…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“It's crazy, but putting a bunch of hard drives in a backpack and getting on a plane turns out the bandwidth of that is pretty hard to beat compared to the internet.” — Pete Florence, The Generalist

Mario Gabriele asked what unscalable things the team did early on to get robot training data flowing. Florence, who builds general-purpose robot models, confirms that flying data around by hand was one of them, especially from places without good fiber.

The Generalist · 2026-10-20 Permalink → Listen →
The Generalist Around 36:39 into the episode
Pete Florence

…training infrastructure and how you fold all these things together and how you think about deployment, et cetera, like you can have efficiency gains that are easily 10, maybe even 100, maybe even 1,000 X relative to somebody who's just buying expensive stuff and seeing what happens with the robot.

Mario Gabriele

…you have to really do the sort of classic YC thing of do things that don't scale, of lugging suitcases full of hard drives and digging trenches for fiber and all of these sorts of things. Can you talk me through a little bit of what were the craziest things you had to do to get that up and running?

Pete Florence

Those are a couple of great examples. I mean, it's crazy, but like putting a bunch of hard drives in a backpack and getting on a plane turns out the bandwidth of that is pretty hard to beat compared to the internet.

Mario Gabriele

Wow.

Pete Florence

Especially when you don't have good fiber lines in remote places of the world. We've also, I think we've shared a little bit about this publicly. We have built like entire custom server machines that just simultaneously upload data from huge numbers of memory cards. Like, you know, basically, I…

Mario Gabriele

And as you think about the data collection piece today, you know, some of this I'm sure is maybe, you know, not for public ears, but to the extent that you can share, like what does that operation look like? Like, what are you trying to run on a weekly, monthly basis? Is that sort of a portfolio of…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

Collections They Appear In

AI Research & Frontier Labs Startups & Venture