GTC rapid-fire: robot execs give four different verbs for how we'll 'program' robots in 5 years
lukas_m_ziegler · x · 2026-10-23
At GTC Berlin, the author ran a rapid-fire round with ABB Robotics and NVIDIA Robotics (Craig McDonnell, Amit Goel). Asked to finish "In five years you won't program a robot, you will ", the two gave four different verbs, each mapping to a distinct stack:
- Demonstrate: teleop rigs and imitation learning
- Instruct: language-conditioned policies and a grounding problem
- Coach: a human in the training loop, corrections accumulating over time
- Prompt: a foundation model behind an API, living with what it gives you
Nobody has settled this — not even the people building it, which the author finds more interesting than any roadmap slide.
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