codekansas

Humans learn differently from LLMs. LLMs already contain most of the information they need to be able to do PCB layout from reading the entire internet, but they need this kind of fast feedback loop to learn how to extract and use that information in the right way. Humans learn to act at the same time they learn knowledge.

A somewhat unpopular opinion, but personally I don't mind being kind of absent in my kids' lives relative to others' expectations. I think there's been some expectation creep around parental involvement for high-achieving couples without much concrete evidence that it hurts long-term outcomes, assuming the child is otherwise healthy and well taken care of. There's also something to be said for leaning on grandparents and other support structures more heavily than a lot of people currently do.

One "superpower" from being married with kids is that your life becomes a lot more predictable. Like, having sex regularly and spending quality family time is probably a healthy part of a balanced, productive lifestyle, and is a good counterbalance to the stresses of a demanding career - it's nice not to always be thinking about how you're going to get laid, or in the event that you do become successful, whether or not your partner is just gold digging you or something. Although a lot of that depends on who you marry and making sure you're both doing good maintenance.

It's basically trying to replicate OpenRouter, which works pretty well and has a lot of nice features to abstract away any single provider, such as failover, metering, autoswitching, etc. It's actually a really smart infrastructure abstraction.

I just wish this were solving an actual problem rather than being a fairly transparent attempt to say something approximating, "Hey VCs, OpenRouter just became a unicorn but I can basically vibe code it"

Calling it "Fable-level" feels intellectually lazy / dishonest, but then again, what do you expect when there's so much money on the table.

Fable-level, yea, but can it run gstack?

I've been thinking for a while that some part of the ebullience towards AI among the American decision-maker class is that it is a good way to stick our heads in the sand and pretend like super-intelligent AI will make up for not being able to build competitive cars and drones. It has the feeling of an easy-to-digest explanation but I'm worried that it's probably wrong.

But they're bootstrapped and using their own money, not defrauding investors

I suspect that these kinds of things will happen with or without my involvement. Assuming that they do, I would rather that a good open source option exists

Oh I see. Yes, we're currently exploring a few different five finger hand options - we will choose whichever option provides the best value. I actually quite like the Inspire hands and we might be able to get a volume discount

Really appreciate it :)

I think we will just focus on making really great, low-cost hardware and a nice SDK, and let other people experiment with different approaches on the intelligence layer.

Well, I believe the competition up until now has mostly been on hardware, but moving forward it will mostly be in software. I don't think we will be outcompeted by Unitree on software. And I hope to capitalize on our engagement with the open source community in a way that Unitree has not.

We try to sell it for a fair price while still making money. Actually I think there will be comparably priced humanoids coming out from other companies soon

I really do think that building through the open source community is the best way to compete with the big players, even without having a lot of capital. Of course, it doesn't mean we can't execute well, but I do think it's a good way to make a lot of progress without spending a lot of money.

I think it's a very hard problem, but I would like to align our company's incentives towards solving it

Yeah, the basic robot is just a robot, albeit with open-source software and hardware

For compute - we're exploring a few boards right now, but the base model will be something from Amlogic and the higher end model will be something from Nvidia

My overall plan is basic joystick control -> VLA with RL -> self-supervised embodied representation -> end-to-end RL -> end-to-end control. I suspect there will be some very good multi modal models coming out in the next few years which we might use as base models, although more likely, we will adapt their techniques to work on data from our own robot.

I agree that the hardware is easier than the software - I am a software guy, personally, but I felt that it was important to do the hardware first so at least we can have a baseline product which we can offer to people. I would personally like to work on this software problem (or rather, build a company to work on this problem), and this seems like the right way to go about funding working on this problem.

This is really interesting to read about. To be honest, I know very little about this space, but it's something a few people have approached me about tackling.

I do think that this is a great application of a general purpose robot. I'm not sure what the technical timeline will be, but it would certainly be cool for my parents to have such a robot when they are elderly.

We're exploring some options - maybe a rental option in the future. Would like to make it accessible to everyone

I have a pretty bad mental model of how most VCs think, but I think good VCs will fund smart people who demonstrate extreme conviction, regardless of how they initially size the market. The opportunity cost for me doing K-Scale is making quite a bit of money at Tesla or Meta, so assuming I am not acting irrationally, either I have extreme conviction or I am a masochist. In my experience, VCs are pretty bad at telling the difference.

Thanks!

We're all pretty cross-stack - there are some hardware people and some software people, but the product is quite integrated. Personally, my time has been mostly focused on the RL stack recently, and after there are more robots in the wild, I suspect my time will transition to working on building this data feedback loop.

I try to answer questions pretty actively on our Discord so happy to chat there about whatever you like

Which link? I can fix

Yes, we are aware of this customer segment. I don't think they have thoroughly considered the implications of what high torque actuators can do to the human body

Yeah I think humanoids are a pretty fraught area. There's definitely been some backlash but overall I have really appreciated the responses we've got from people. Like, I just want people to care about what we're doing - if positive that's great, if negative then we can learn how to do better. As long as people have an opinion one way or the other, I'm happy :)

This is a much better answer than mine

Yeah of course. That's kind of the whole point - I don't think you can really trust a humanoid robot in your house around your family if it is not clear what it's running. Basically, for myself, I would not want to buy a closed sourced humanoid, and I view myself as relatively representative of the early adopter mentality. So personally I think this is the right way to build a great product.

I basically believe that in a world where humanoid robots are actually useful, we will not have any trouble monetizing. Probably we will verticalize manufacturing at some point in the future. I think the bigger risks for our business model are not from people copying us or something, but from not making progress fast enough.

Yeah, this is exactly the kind of use case we intend to support. Basically, we want our robot to be the best mass-produced robot for this kind of experimentation.

Yep I definitely agree. Our team is pretty small and bandwidth limited

I basically think our goal is to solve all the boring stuff and make it work reliably, so that other can people can try out the cool ML stuff more easily

Eh. I think we got a bit nerd-sniped on some things and we ended up trying to build most of our stack ourselves. The control loop is just a pretty simple Rust loop for running ML models. ROS is kind of annoying to work with and the control loop is pretty simple so we just wrote it ourselves.

For two legged - I think it will eventually be quite a bit cheaper, it's mostly a software problem to get them to be stable. RL based control has gotten much, much better. For example, I was talking to Trevor Blackwell a few weeks ago, and he was saying the IMU on the original Anybots robot was over $2k, whereas if you throw a noisy IMU into sim, you can get away with something basically from a cellphone. So yea, personally I'm a big believer in needing to solve the robotics intelligence problem, and once you solve that, humanoids will make the most sense as a form factor.