# Chelsea Finn: Building Robots That Can Do Anything

**Author:** Y Combinator
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Mj-chelsea-finn-building-robots-that-can-do-anything
**YouTube ID:** a8-QsBHoH94

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Chelsea Finn on June 17th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.

From MIT through her PhD at Berkeley, where she pioneered meta‑learning methods, and Google Brain, Chelsea Finn has
built her career around teaching machines how to learn. Now an Assistant Professor at Stanford and co‑founder of
Physical Intelligence, she’s using that foundation to bring learning-driven robotics into messy, real-world environments
rather than confined lab setups.

In this talk, Chelsea traces the evolution of her team’s work—from early experiments on robotic grasping and vision to
today’s ambitious efforts at folding laundry, tidying kitchens, and generalizing across tasks—all without hand-crafted
code. Instead, they used scalable foundation models and massive datasets, teaching robots physical common sense as they
learn by doing.

She shares stories of the rocky setbacks, the surprises hidden in data, and the moment it all clicked: robots equipped
with generalizable physical intelligence can indeed adapt and assist in the unpredictable world around us.

