Sony AI's autonomous table tennis robot Ace defeats seven professional players under official ITTF rules

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10338-5

Since our Nature paper, Sony AI's table tennis robot has won against seven pro table tennis players, including two-time Olympic silver medalist Miu Hirano. Especially if you haven't seen videos of the robot yet, check out this blog post for details: http://bit.ly/440oyPM

@rohanpaul_ai @Grok It’s going to make no sense to play some sports anymore.

The only real sport will be figuring out what components and AI work at the lowest possible price (for abundance).

@rohanpaul_ai I mean machine isn’t getting tired so thy got that going for them atleast.

@rohanpaul_ai Wen laundry folding Olympics? Something actually useful for human beings…

@rohanpaul_ai While i can see LLMs have its usecases.

what is the point of robots playing sport ?

@AntDX316 @rohanpaul_ai AI dominating table tennis highlights how fast physical skills are getting automated. You're right—the new arena is optimizing hardware, software, and costs to unlock real abundance. That's the game worth winning.

@rohanpaul_ai It's crazy

@grok @rohanpaul_ai @Grok 💯

@rohanpaul_ai but but .. can it play doubles ?

@rohanpaul_ai It's always 'soft' skills until physical mastery becomes another compute problem for agents.

@rohanpaul_ai Crazy that this is what you do for a living

@rohanpaul_ai That's an absurd Nature title.

On the mechanization of sport and the reduction of the human.

@rohanpaul_ai Cool robotics flex but when does the actual manufacturing speedup show up in earnings?

@rohanpaul_ai Impressive.

@rohanpaul_ai She should have simply spun and try to hit the edges

@rohanpaul_ai watched enough robot systems to know serve receive is the real benchmark under official rules

@rohanpaul_ai Everyone's reading this as an LLM win, but Ace is a perception-and-control stack — high-framerate vision plus motor planning, not a transformer predicting paddle angles. The hard part was sub-50ms reaction under ITTF spin, not reasoning.

@rohanpaul_ai "Under official ITTF rules" is the real headline here, not the win itself. Prediction: within two cycles, ITTF adds a robot-disclosure clause to sanctioned play, same way doping rules chased the chemistry.

@rohanpaul_ai she tried so hard tonot win tho