In this episode, I talk with Vikash Kumar, Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon and founder of MyoLab.AI, where he’s building human-embodied AI systems:
We talk about growing up in a small Indian town, the influence of his mother on his early learning, and how a robotics club at IIT Kharagpur set him on a 15-year path through the world’s top labs.
From a PhD at the University of Washington, to OpenAI, Google Brain, Meta FAIR, and now his own company! Vikash shares how his curiosity evolved from tinkering with machines to uncovering the fundamentals of embodied intelligence, and why he believes the future of AI is physical, not just linguistic.
He also explains the bold vision behind MyoLab: building “digital twins” that are physiologically and behaviorally lifelike; AI companions that understand not just what you say, but who you are. We talk about how this intersects with robotics, health, memory, and agency, and why the path to general intelligence may start in the body, not the cloud.
