Glen Berseth: foundation models made 1960s robot tasks cheap, but performance is still the bottleneck

GlenBerseth · x · 2026-09-16

Robotics researcher Glen Berseth published a piece tempering enthusiasm around foundation models for robots.

Historical framing: Minsky's lab in the 1960s already had a robot arm using vision to understand object geometry, plan paths, and assemble parts — today's foundation models solve the same class of problem, just far cheaper and faster to set up.
Core argument: the goal shouldn't only be moving the cost curve left; performance must advance — object variety, robustness to the wild, multi-robot/human-robot interaction, real-time control, and better hardware ("human hands are still impressive"). He quotes Jitendra Malik: "robotics is also about dexterity and dynamics."
Self-driving cars are the clearest example: decades of effort, still hard, because they need real-time closed-loop feedback, not just cheaper static perception + planning.
Conclusion: the field must answer which performance direction to push, not just celebrate deployment cost reductions.

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