GrowBot, the $80 robot handed to ChatGPT, keeps Brit Cruise's shelf busy
No new Art of the Problem videos went up, and the robot story from May has passed five million views.
Why this story? The channel's weekly summary: what went up this week, what is drawing views now, and where the channel stands among similar channels.
I Gave ChatGPT a Body
Twenty weeks after it went up, "I Gave ChatGPT a Body" is still the video doing most of the work on Art of the Problem. Brit Cruise posted nothing new this week, and his channel leaned on the robot he calls GrowBot.
The idea, as the description lays it out, was the simplest robot that could learn everything from scratch: a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, two servos, a camera and some 3D printed parts, about $80 in all. Small neural networks taught it to walk and spin in simulation, then a vision language model took over the motors, wrote its own code, built profiles of the people it met and "dreamed" between sessions. Then it hit a wall: how do you move smoothly when thinking is slow? That question sends the video into the cerebellum, nature's answer, and into the robotics research the tags name, from DayDreamer to RT-2.
Behind it, two older deep dives keep a steadier pace. "The Alien Signal That Looked Intelligent" has crossed a million views by running Jocelyn Bell's pulsars, the Wow Signal and Zipf's law through Claude Shannon's information theory, the subject of Cruise's own series a dozen years ago. "A Rock Is Trapped Light" traces matter from Greek lodestones to Kelvin's vortex atoms.
Views ran a little under the channel's usual pace, and about a thousand new subscribers arrived. Among the science channels nearest its size, Ziroth and Bizarre Beasts had the lively weeks, while Event Horizon and Fran Blanche stayed calm.
Published on Trari
Where next?
The videos drawing views on Art of the Problem right now
- Channel
- Art of the Problem
- Subscribers
- 392,000 ▲ 1,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 243,126
- Videos published this week
- 0
The numbers
Here is how Art of the Problem's week looks in figures.
💡 Test your knowledge
Claude Shannon, whose information theory runs through the alien signal video, laid out its foundations in a 1948 paper while working at which lab?
Shannon published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948 while at Bell Telephone Laboratories.




