This episode features Dr. Maxwell Ramstead and Jason Fox both from Noumenal discussing why current AI approaches fall short for real-world applications and what’s needed for true physical AI.

The guests argue that today’s AI systems, including large language models, are fundamentally “stuck in data space” – they only process patterns in data rather than understanding the physical world that generates that data.

Maxwell uses Plato’s Cave as a powerful metaphor: like prisoners seeing only shadows on a wall, LLMs interact with representations of reality (text, images) rather than reality itself.

Rather than building monolithic models, Noumenal is creating a compositional system – essentially a “marketplace of models” where specialized AI components can be dynamically combined and deployed to robots.

Sponsor messages:
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Tufa AI Labs are hiring for ML Engineers and a Chief Scientist in Zurich/SF. They are top of the ARCv2 leaderboard!
https://tufalabs.ai/
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https://www.noumenal.ai/
https://x.com/mjdramstead
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=ILpGOMkAAAAJ&hl=fr
https://x.com/jasongfox?lang=en-GB

TOC

Opening & Context
00:00:00 – Opening Hook: Why Create a Physical AI Company?
00:01:59 – Sponsor: Tufa AI Labs
00:02:30 – Guest Introductions: Maxwell Ramstead & Jason Fox
00:05:18 – Noumenal Background

Core Problems with Current AI
00:09:30 – The Embodiment Problem: Why Bodies Matter
00:10:15 – LLMs Lack Physical Grounding
00:12:00 – AI Stuck in Plato’s Cave
00:16:15 – Language as Wrong Compression for Physics
00:17:22 – The Exhaustion of Static Datasets
00:19:54 – Humans as the Grounding for LLMs

Philosophical Foundations
00:28:00 – Fractured vs. Deep Understanding
00:32:15 – Defining “Real”: When You Bump Into Things
00:37:00 – Emergence: Weak vs. Strong Causal Power
00:41:45 – The Free Energy Principle Explained
00:44:15 – Constraints: How the Universe Builds Things

Objects, Intelligence & Grounding
00:46:15 – What Is an Object? From Data to Physics
00:51:00 – Learning Primitives & Predictive Grip
00:55:58 – “There Is No General Intelligence”
01:00:15 – The Human-AI Feedback Loop
01:03:08 – The Irony of LLM Specialization
01:06:05 – LLMs as Tools vs. Autonomous Agents
01:08:45 – Hallucinating Capabilities: The Third Leg Problem

The Noumenal Solution
01:09:00 – A Marketplace of Specialized Models
01:13:45 – Dynamic Skill Loading: “Phone a Friend”
01:16:15 – Learning from Brain Evolution
01:18:00 – Business Model Critique: Why OpenAI Won’t Work
01:22:30 – The Physical Dataset Problem

Implementation & Future
01:22:30 – Community-Driven Data Collection
01:24:45 – Jim Fan’s Physical Turing Test
01:26:30 – Enterprise vs. Consumer Models
01:27:22 – Docker for Robotics: The Technical Architecture
01:30:12 – Reproducibility in Learning Systems
01:32:00 – Closing Thoughts

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