A robot is beating human pros at table tennis

I actually work at Sony AI, though not in this team, so I can't offer an AMA :p

Some context I can give is this is the the 3rd time SAI has published on the cover of Nature, the first two being:

1. GT Sophy: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04357-7

2. FHIBE: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09716-2

What work does your team do?

Unfortunately I can't say, SAI is very hush hush on what projects it has (until I chooses to announce ofc). All I can say is my (much smaller team) is working on very unrelated stuff

Previously: Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players 21 hours ago|172 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47864785

This is about as surprising as "robot beats human at weight lifting" --- which is an every day occurrence.

The most surprising thing is the time and money spent on constructing a robot strictly for this purpose.