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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Fmr: YC W24, AI researcher at FAIR, Autopilot ML engineer at Tesla FSD
Personal website: https://ben.bolte.cc/