When an AI image generator produces a portrait, whose work went into it? The question sits at the center of lawsuits, licensing deals, and proposed regulations worldwide. Artists want credit. Companies want clarity. Policymakers want a way to assign responsibility.
Daniela Rus, Director of MIT CSAIL and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President for her contributions to robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems.
Khosla Ventures focuses on high-risk, high-impact investments across artificial intelligence (AI), climate change, sustainability, enterprise, consumer, fintech, digital health, and frontier technologies. In this tech talk, Khosla Ventures will be leading conversations with one of their ventures, Foundry Robotics. Join the team over lunch to learn more about Foundry Robotics and their technology, opportunities to work at Foundry Robotics, Khosla Ventures, and more of Khosla Ventures' portfolio companies.
Add to calendarAmerica/New_YorkTech Talk with Khosla Ventures09/23/2026
Khosla Ventures focuses on high-risk, high-impact investments across artificial intelligence (AI), climate change, sustainability, enterprise, consumer, fintech, digital health, and frontier technologies. In this tech talk, Khosla Ventures will be leading conversations with one of their ventures, Foundry Robotics. Join the team over lunch to learn more about Foundry Robotics and their technology, opportunities to work at Foundry Robotics, Khosla Ventures, and more of Khosla Ventures' portfolio companies.
Adarsh Kulkarni is founder and CEO of Foundry Robotics, an AI-first contract manufacturer building and operating its own robot-run assembly facilities for defense and industrial customers. He was employee #4 at Ghost Robotics and built Scale AI's robotics organization from scratch. He studied robotics at Penn. His bet is that owning the factory, not just selling robots into someone else's, is how physical AI reaches production. (https://foundryrobotics.ai/)
Sarah Altabet leads early-career and university recruiting at Khosla Ventures, where she connects students and researchers with roles across the firm's 450+ portfolio companies spanning AI, deep tech, biotech, and climate. For CSAIL students, that means one conversation surfaces opportunities you'd otherwise have to find company-by-company — research scientist and applied ML roles, founding engineering seats at early-stage startups, and introductions tailored to your specific research area rather than generic job postings.
Prior to KV, Sarah grew early-career and university recruiting programs at Western Digital and Rivian.
Curious to learn more about our Startup Programs? Info here.
In his recent conversation on Building 32, MIT CSAIL Senior Research Scientist David Clark tells a story from 1995 when he got into a conversation with an economist and friend of his. “He said, ‘David, you have to understand the internet is about routing money, and routing packets is a side effect. And you screwed up the money routing protocols.’ And I said, ‘I didn't design any money routing protocols.’ And he said, ‘that's what I said.’”
The deployment of automated software systems called AI agents has recently exploded. A November 2025 report by MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston Consulting Group found that 35 percent of surveyed businesses had already deployed AI agents, while another 44 percent planned to implement agentic AI soon.
Agentic workflows are artificial intelligence-powered software systems that chain together multiple models and external tools to tackle complicated tasks, like analyzing a video and answering questions about it.
An increasingly common sight: robots walking down the street, surrounded by astounded onlookers. But these machines aren’t yet the do-it-all assistants you’d want working in a kitchen or factory, and a major bottleneck is data. Much like humans, robots learn best by experience. The challenge is that it’s labor-intensive and time-consuming to physically teach these machines so many actions across different settings.
In his 1927 paper, “A law of comparative judgment,” the American psychologist L. L. Thurstone proposed that when people select one option among multiple alternatives, they are picking the one that has the highest value to them, even though they cannot assign a particular number to that choice.
