Ten hot takes from IROS 2026: Astra follows instructions, diffusion has no future
A robotics-room roundup argues GPT-6 Astra's strong instruction following lifts everything beneath it, System 1 may be optional, diffusion has no future, and humanoid control is 80% solved.
System 1 might be optional. Diffusion has no future. Humanoid control is 80% solved. 🌶️ 10 hot takes from the room at IROS 2026: 1️⃣ GPT-6 Astra is strong. It actually follows instructions, and that makes everything underneath it stronger. 2️⃣ Once a task is automated, it's just another function call. You may not need System 1 at all; call it only when needed. System 2 reasoning is already strong enough. 3️⃣ Some scenarios don't need a VLA or a world action model (WAM). Code-as-policy works. For dexterous hands: agent as a policy. 4️⃣ Guanya: LLMs like Astra are tools for doing robotics. Human imagination needs pretraining, and a pretrained LLM won't beat manual idea generation. 5️⃣ Design for zero-shot from day one. Zero-shot, start to finish. 6️⃣ Against in-context learning? Zero-shot from a foundation model right out of the gate? Even mapo tofu is fine-tuning. 7️⃣ Teleop can't do micro-motions like snapping a cookie. Vision sees no difference; the fingers make all the difference. Only RL gets you there, and probably not pure vision-based. 8️⃣ Humanoid control is 80% solved. The rest falls soon. 9️⃣ Workspace model, diffusion: no future. 🔟 The hand race: Sharpa wants to do it all. Wuji builds hands. Reasoning is moving up into frontier models, code and function calls. The unsolved part is moving down to the fingertips: contact, RL, beyond pure vision. Which take ages worst? 👇 #Robotics #EmbodiedAI #IROS2026 #HumanoidRobots #DexterousManipulation