“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.”
The Generalist · Startups & Venture · October 2026
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.
Transcript
…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.
…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
…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…
And you could put one on a
different wall, and that would be a lot of a
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…
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