Robotics researchers in denial about the bitter lesson: "if it can make slides, it's already a VLA"
keerthanpg · x · 2026-11-12
keerthanpg argues the strange thing about the bitter lesson is that experts in every field believe it applies to all fields except their own — hence the bitterness. Case in point: roboticists at CoRL going through the five stages of grief, many in denial.
Core argument
- Accepting the bitter lesson + scaling laws helps you pick approaches that survive as robotics gets solved
- Robotic control isn't special — it's adjacent to multimodal reasoning, CAD, computer use, coding; "if it can make slides, it's already a multimodal VLA"
- VLA experts long said generalization is the true test of intelligence, yet push back when frontier models generalize better than specialized robotics models
- The paradigm shift is here: adapt your research or be proven wrong
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