Jim Fan trains robots on human video, calls VR teleop rigs unscalable 'torture devices'
dawnsongtweets · x · 2026-09-23
In a Berkeley RDI interview, Nvidia's Jim Fan slammed VR teleoperation rigs for robot training as "medieval torture devices" that fundamentally don't scale. He trains almost entirely on ordinary human video instead. The core debate: can video alone teach dexterity? You can see a hand move, but not the force it applied — a tradeoff between scale and missing force/haptic information.
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