technology

The next big bottleneck in AI may not be model size or compute. It may be access to grounded, real-world experience. If millions of embodied robots begin operating in homes, vehicles and care settings, they could generate filtered experience traces that improve LLM-plus systems far beyond what internet text alone can provide. Child-size companion robots may be especially important because they open access to a domain that today’s AI models understand badly: children’s language-in-context and everyday micro-social interaction. But this only works if the architecture is privacy-first: central systems should receive distilled updates, not intimate raw detail from children’s lives, except under tightly governed emergency rules.