{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The OPTIM Update","title":"Determinism Is King: A Game Engine Built for Robot Training Data | Devrim Yasar, Lucky Robots","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3518,"description":"Devrim Yasar wanted a robot that would pick up his son's Legos. The roboticist he hired told him to buy a $50,000 Franka Panda and a $15,000 base, sprinkle five toys on the living-room floor, and train a policy on that. That was 2024, and it is why Lucky Robots exists. Devrim had built Koding.com to over a million developers and sold Superpeer to Skillshare, and he had built architectural visualizations in game engines at university, so his answer was a game engine for robots.\nLucky Engine is a game engine built from scratch for one job: generating training data. Describe a robot, a task and a room, and it builds the scene and runs the episode on MuJoCo physics while recording every joint and camera frame, at up to 10,000 Hz, without drift. Yan Chernikov, The Cherno, rebuilt it on his Hazel engine after eight months in Unreal went nowhere: 3.2 GB of Unreal became 20 MB of Hazel, and fifteen-minute compiles became a click. Devrim's argument is that determinism is king. Teleop cannot rerun the episode where the robot spilled the coffee, world models have never produced a deterministic dataset, and Isaac Sim \"wasted three months of my life.\" His verdict: \"If Isaac Sim is BlackBerry, I think we built the iPhone.\"\nWe cover why a $65,000 setup for five toys made him start a company, what a LeRobot dataset looks like when you open it and why it cannot drift, why Unreal's tick function drops the frames a policy needs, how he recruited The Cherno with an email and an offsite in Austin, MuJoCo as a first-class citizen and Jolt as second class, gRPC, C# and ONNX policies, the smoke-break policy trained on teleop data from India, what teleop really costs ($20 to $200 an hour quoted, about $800 an hour in-house at one humanoid company, two hours a day before the operator gets dizzy), why the frontier labs buy instead of build, the bet that game developers will solve robotics, the fellowship, and his hot takes: a laundry-folding humanoid in a year to a year and a half, and 99%...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/MD1uw3xsUV8NIC9WNTbAWnAxAqctNuVEgSaMzKwMDRQ/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9jYTFk/YTA0N2ZmOThmMmZl/ZGVjMjA3NWMwZDUw/YmRlMS5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}