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The hardest problems in AI aren't research problems anymore. They're deployment problems. It’s how we actually deliver real value, today, to build the future people want. That’s why, after 20 years in AI, my next step was inevitable: make robots do useful work for and alongside people, right now.... Today, I am delighted to announce the launch of Walden Robotics to tackle just that. We started this year and are coming out of stealth today with a $300M seed round backed by some of the most serious companies and investors in the world. They have seen firsthand our general-purpose robots being useful in production on day one, and getting better every day after. You can see a glimpse of what we've been building in the video below. Physical AI has gone through a rapid phase transition, in part thanks to pioneering research from my friends and co-founders Russ Tedrake , Ben Burchfiel , Siyuan Feng, Rareș Ambruș , and many others at Walden. But from our long experience working together with co-founders Kerri Fetzer-Borelli and Dave Johnson, we learned how hard it is to deploy cutting-edge AI in a real, live, incredibly sophisticated production environment with an intricate ballet of automation and human ingenuity. That’s why we deliberately created Walden Robotics as a full-stack, human-centric, customer-focused robotics company from the start: we seeded the company with a world-class team across hardware, software, AI, deployment, operations, product, and business talent, so we could continuously optimize our whole system end-to-end, deeply and purposefully, from real-world experience with real customers. The efficacy of this strategy speaks for itself: since February, our general-purpose robots have been doing useful work in production at a Toyota plant in North America, moving from first pilot to real work in under two months. Not a lab. Not a demo. Not a future promise. Real work on a real line, today, at one of the best large-scale manufacturers in the world, with general-purpose robots that get better every day. And this is just the beginning. Two ways to find us: If you run a manufacturing or logistics business and want robots that are widely useful now, not someday, let's talk. We own “ for a reason! And if you want to build them: we're hiring across the company, from software, to hardware, AI, ops, product, business, and more. In particular, as the Chief Strategy Officer at Walden, I am recruiting for three incredibly impactful founding roles to fuel our agent-native go-to-market engine. Check out Let’s build together!show more

Adrien Gaidon

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25,833 views • 13 hours ago •via X (Twitter)

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$Today, we're announcing Larridin. Our company built to enable organizations to continuously measure and optimize workforce & AI agent productivity. Over the last year, we talked with thousands of our former customers and partners. Again and again we heard the same thing from CEOs, CFOs, Heads of HR, as well as other business leaders - the current tools to measure and understand corporate productivity are severely outdated and not helpful in a world of AI. Every company now has humans working alongside AI and, in some cases, machines / robots. Our solution is designed to fill the measurement void and help prioritize investment decisions across people, processes, and deployment of AI. We have raised a $17M financing led by Alex Rampell from a16z and joined by our friends Roy E. Bahat and James Cham from Bloomberg Beta, Darian Shirazi from Gradient, Semil from Haystack, 👨🏻‍💻☕️ and Satya Patel from Homebrew, kunle.app from Refract Ventures, Emilie Choi 🛡️, Alex Cohen, Greg Galant, Bradley Horowitz, Joe Hyrkin, meet w/me: Gokul Rajaram, Charlie Songhurst, Rick Thompson, and many others. After 25+ years building enterprise technology companies with my co-founder Jim Larrison, we’re ready to equip organizations for the AI-powered future along with our new partner, Ameya Kanitkar and our amazing growing team. Let's build the future of work, together. Reach out if you’re interested in learning more!$

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Russell Fradin

19,519 views • 1 year ago

Why I’m bullish on AI in 2026 2026 feels like the year AI becomes impossible to ignore. Not because of better chatbots, but because AI starts doing real work. Agents will run tasks end to end, humanoid robots will actually work in factories, and suddenly the labor market feels very different. That’s when the disbelief fades. Demis Hassabis basically confirmed it: reliable agentic systems, a real robotics push, useful on-device assistants, and world models that let AI plan in the real world. That combo is explosive. Once people see robots on factory floors and AI agents quietly replacing office tasks, the conversation changes. AI stops being hype and starts being reality. That’s why 2026 matters

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VraserX e/acc

13,939 views • 5 months ago

Can United States manufacture robots? Matic Robots says "yes." It makes the best floor cleaning robot, that has won many perfect scores from Wired to many others. We love ours. But my trip there to get a tour from AI pioneer Navneet Dalal Navneet Dalal provided some real insights into how hard it is for a hardware company to make hardware in the United States. And how deeply AI is changing consumer electronics products that are going to be in many more homes soon. In this first part (Part II coming tomorrow) we get a look at how long it took for this company to go through prototypes to a shipping product. In the second part, you'll see the scaling hell that it takes to even ship a few thousand robots and the kinds of problems that scaling up a factory brings. Matic is one of my favorite small Silicon Valley companies. It has found what we call "product market fit." I just came back from CES where I saw many of its competitors, and the Matic wins because of not just the product thinking of Mehul and Navneet Dalal but because of their AI leadership. In a way their robot took many lessons from Tesla, from where to put the batteries to its bet on computer vision, which Navneet has been a pioneer in for years, working quietly behind the scenes. It is about to move into a new location that will allow it to grow to meet the demand that now is showing up (the boxes in its lobby show that it's outgrowing its current facilities). In terms of AI, it has aspirations of making a humanoid too, but it is taking a far more measured approach to getting there. By starting on the floor it can not just build world models based on real world data (customers are given a choice whether to allow its data to be used that way. Most customers choose to keep their data on the robot only, for privacy reasons, but if you opt in you can help them improve their models). They are using that data to understand homes. Navneet told me they hit very unusual situations in people's homes already that they couldn't really predict in simulators, like full-wall mirrors that confuse computer vision systems, or pools and water features in people's homes. Having real customers brings a ton of customer feedback about how to further improve the robot, and, as Navneet demonstrates in the second video, forces them to build a manufacturing muscle memory. Getting teams to work together, figuring out how to solve supply chain problems, from Trump's tarriffs, to a new one that showed up over the past couple of weeks. A supplier for its bags (one of the cheaper parts that goes into the robot) changed the glue it used, which caused robots to fail quality tests and the manufacturing line to stop. Reminds me a lot of the hell Elon Musk faced in its Fremont factory when Tesla was first starting to manufacture its Model 3, which almost bankrupted the company. Off the record Mehul and Navneet 🇮🇳 showed me some of the prototypes and plans for its next products that will show up over the next few years. Certainly not as sexy as Tesla, Figure, 1x_tech, and all the Chinese manufacturers are showing off already, but far better thought out for the typical Western home and AI plays a huge role in its future. It is the product that speaks for itself. It's amazing, and is about to get better this year due to AI. It's the first real vision-only robot to be in my home and I bet it won't be the last from this company. Real honor that they invited me over with my Insta360 camera (another company launched in my home, just like Matic was last year). In Part II we go into the factory.

Can United States manufacture robots? Matic Robots says "yes." It makes the best floor cleaning robot, that has won many perfect scores from Wired to many others. We love ours. But my trip there to get a tour from AI pioneer Navneet Dalal Navneet Dalal provided some real insights into how hard it is for a hardware company to make hardware in the United States. And how deeply AI is changing consumer electronics products that are going to be in many more homes soon. In this first part (Part II coming tomorrow) we get a look at how long it took for this company to go through prototypes to a shipping product. In the second part, you'll see the scaling hell that it takes to even ship a few thousand robots and the kinds of problems that scaling up a factory brings. Matic is one of my favorite small Silicon Valley companies. It has found what we call "product market fit." I just came back from CES where I saw many of its competitors, and the Matic wins because of not just the product thinking of Mehul and Navneet Dalal but because of their AI leadership. In a way their robot took many lessons from Tesla, from where to put the batteries to its bet on computer vision, which Navneet has been a pioneer in for years, working quietly behind the scenes. It is about to move into a new location that will allow it to grow to meet the demand that now is showing up (the boxes in its lobby show that it's outgrowing its current facilities). In terms of AI, it has aspirations of making a humanoid too, but it is taking a far more measured approach to getting there. By starting on the floor it can not just build world models based on real world data (customers are given a choice whether to allow its data to be used that way. Most customers choose to keep their data on the robot only, for privacy reasons, but if you opt in you can help them improve their models). They are using that data to understand homes. Navneet told me they hit very unusual situations in people's homes already that they couldn't really predict in simulators, like full-wall mirrors that confuse computer vision systems, or pools and water features in people's homes. Having real customers brings a ton of customer feedback about how to further improve the robot, and, as Navneet demonstrates in the second video, forces them to build a manufacturing muscle memory. Getting teams to work together, figuring out how to solve supply chain problems, from Trump's tarriffs, to a new one that showed up over the past couple of weeks. A supplier for its bags (one of the cheaper parts that goes into the robot) changed the glue it used, which caused robots to fail quality tests and the manufacturing line to stop. Reminds me a lot of the hell Elon Musk faced in its Fremont factory when Tesla was first starting to manufacture its Model 3, which almost bankrupted the company. Off the record Mehul and Navneet 🇮🇳 showed me some of the prototypes and plans for its next products that will show up over the next few years. Certainly not as sexy as Tesla, Figure, 1x_tech, and all the Chinese manufacturers are showing off already, but far better thought out for the typical Western home and AI plays a huge role in its future. It is the product that speaks for itself. It's amazing, and is about to get better this year due to AI. It's the first real vision-only robot to be in my home and I bet it won't be the last from this company. Real honor that they invited me over with my Insta360 camera (another company launched in my home, just like Matic was last year). In Part II we go into the factory.

Robert Scoble

69,229 views • 5 months ago

Jensen Huang just said this is the greatest era in history to build software. AI agents will not kill software. They will do the exact opposite: create a massive new wave of software demand. at NVIDIA GTC Taipei 2026 "Click and type. We now replace that with explaining to the AI what we want, our intent, and the AI generates the code or uses tools to produce the necessary output. This is how computers are going to work in the future. This is Agentic AI. For two years, we've been building toward this, and now it has arrived. One of the big breakthroughs, of course, is tool use. A lot of people have said, “Jensen, AI is coming. Agentic AI is coming. Therefore, all the software companies are going to go out of business.” This is exactly the opposite. Because there are going to be so many agents, the world is no longer limited by the number of people. Therefore, those agents are going to use more tools than ever. This is actually an incredible time to be a software company. But the software has to be presented to the agent in a way that the agent can use it. This is a big breakthrough. And in fact, what we have done, as you know, what Nvidia’s treasure..." ---- From 'NVIDIA' YT channel (link in comment)

Jensen Huang just said this is the greatest era in history to build software. AI agents will not kill software. They will do the exact opposite: create a massive new wave of software demand. at NVIDIA GTC Taipei 2026 "Click and type. We now replace that with explaining to the AI what we want, our intent, and the AI generates the code or uses tools to produce the necessary output. This is how computers are going to work in the future. This is Agentic AI. For two years, we've been building toward this, and now it has arrived. One of the big breakthroughs, of course, is tool use. A lot of people have said, “Jensen, AI is coming. Agentic AI is coming. Therefore, all the software companies are going to go out of business.” This is exactly the opposite. Because there are going to be so many agents, the world is no longer limited by the number of people. Therefore, those agents are going to use more tools than ever. This is actually an incredible time to be a software company. But the software has to be presented to the agent in a way that the agent can use it. This is a big breakthrough. And in fact, what we have done, as you know, what Nvidia’s treasure..." ---- From 'NVIDIA' YT channel (link in comment)

Rohan Paul

16,584 views • 1 month ago

Karol Hausman is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence, a robotics company building a general-purpose “AI brain for the physical world.” The company has raised more than $1 billion in funding to develop foundation models that allow robots to operate across many machines, environments, and tasks rather than being programmed for a single purpose. In our conversation, we explore: • The moment a lecture from Sergey Levine convinced him to abandon his PhD research direction and pivot fully to deep learning • The case for building a general “AI brain” for the physical world rather than a single specialized robot • The role of real-world data in training robots, the limits of simulation, and how deployment could create a powerful data flywheel • The unique challenges of physical intelligence and why robots must operate with far higher reliability than language models Thank you to the partners who make this possible - Brex: The intelligent finance platform: - Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings: Timestamps (00:00) Intro (04:05) Karol’s early fascination with robots (18:21) Karol’s entry point to robotics and PhD program (25:49) Combining robotics with LLMs: The Taylor Swift demo (30:48) The 1970s SHRDLU AI experiment (39:40) How research shapes what Physical Intelligence builds (49:07) The return of reinforcement learning in robotics (1:00:00) NVIDIA’s simulation engines (1:07:31) Compensating for missing senses

Karol Hausman is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence, a robotics company building a general-purpose “AI brain for the physical world.” The company has raised more than $1 billion in funding to develop foundation models that allow robots to operate across many machines, environments, and tasks rather than being programmed for a single purpose. In our conversation, we explore: • The moment a lecture from Sergey Levine convinced him to abandon his PhD research direction and pivot fully to deep learning • The case for building a general “AI brain” for the physical world rather than a single specialized robot • The role of real-world data in training robots, the limits of simulation, and how deployment could create a powerful data flywheel • The unique challenges of physical intelligence and why robots must operate with far higher reliability than language models Thank you to the partners who make this possible - Brex: The intelligent finance platform: - Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings: Timestamps (00:00) Intro (04:05) Karol’s early fascination with robots (18:21) Karol’s entry point to robotics and PhD program (25:49) Combining robotics with LLMs: The Taylor Swift demo (30:48) The 1970s SHRDLU AI experiment (39:40) How research shapes what Physical Intelligence builds (49:07) The return of reinforcement learning in robotics (1:00:00) NVIDIA’s simulation engines (1:07:31) Compensating for missing senses

Mario Gabriele 🦊

27,871 views • 4 months ago

David from USD.AI on the institutional shift happening behind CHIP, why every borrower they have is institutional, and why the AI super cycle has had no real on-chain exposure until now: "We have personally beat out other investment banks in running deals that we've signed. They're starting to view us as a threat. One call we had, she ended it early: 'I think you're a competitor, I can't talk anymore.' We're just cheaper financing, even for the bigger deals. People think we only do small deals, but we're starting to get bigger and bigger. As we attract more capital, we have to deploy in bigger deals to keep up. All of our customers are institutional. There's not a single retail borrower. These chips are expensive: The minimum we lend against is H200s, clusters of eight, that's like 300k. We're working with many of the brand names in San Francisco that are actually in the AI sector. People appreciate the positioning of Chip; it's actually engaging with the AI economy. A lot of people claim to be AI. They're in their own version of AI that they think is AI. But then there's the OpenAIs of the world. There's the Cursors of the world. Real customers, with real backing, that have cash flows. That is what people in our space want exposure to. We just haven't had a good way to do it. There's a reason you can get a loan against an airplane or a Honda Civic, but not a GPU. And GPUs are going to be worth a lot more than cars or airplanes in the future." Clip from the Modern Market interview with David | www.usd.ai

The Modern Market Show

10,397 views • 2 months ago

We’re thrilled to share that Outset has raised $17M in Series A funding, led by 8VC to help companies better understand their customers. When michael hess and I founded Outset, we set out to solve a critical problem: truly understanding your customer is painfully slow, expensive, and at times, impossible. It shouldn’t be. We believed AI could change this by focusing on the human side of AI. So we built the world’s first AI-interviewer. An AI agent that asked questions, listened, and learned from real humans. By removing the barriers of traditional research and allowing companies to have deeper conversations with more customers more quickly, we could help teams infuse their products with genuine human understanding at a speed and scale previously impossible. So what was the moment we knew we were onto something? When WeightWatchers ran that first pilot back in early 2023. Participants shared incredible amounts of depth, all with the world’s first AI-interviewer. We got a call the next day from their head of research: "You built a thing. We want that thing. How do I pay you for it?" That validation has turned into explosive growth. We've doubled our revenue in just the last 4 months alone, with >50 enterprise customers like Nestlé, Microsoft, and WeightWatchers trusting us to unlock deeper customer insights. All of this built on the backs of a truly special early team with 0 employee turnover. This funding round was led by 8VC, with participation from an incredible group, including: Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company, Y Combinator / Garry Tan, Adverb Ventures /April Underwood / Jessica Verrilli ), Alt Capital / Jack Altman , Rebel Fund, Genius Ventures, Ritual Capital, and many more. So what's next? We're scaling our engineering and go-to-market teams to build the world's most powerful agentic customer research platform. All focused on one mission: helping companies better understand humans. To our customers, investors, and team - thank you for believing in this vision. Now check out the video to see Outset in action, testing the video itself with real people!

We’re thrilled to share that Outset has raised $17M in Series A funding, led by 8VC to help companies better understand their customers. When michael hess and I founded Outset, we set out to solve a critical problem: truly understanding your customer is painfully slow, expensive, and at times, impossible. It shouldn’t be. We believed AI could change this by focusing on the human side of AI. So we built the world’s first AI-interviewer. An AI agent that asked questions, listened, and learned from real humans. By removing the barriers of traditional research and allowing companies to have deeper conversations with more customers more quickly, we could help teams infuse their products with genuine human understanding at a speed and scale previously impossible. So what was the moment we knew we were onto something? When WeightWatchers ran that first pilot back in early 2023. Participants shared incredible amounts of depth, all with the world’s first AI-interviewer. We got a call the next day from their head of research: "You built a thing. We want that thing. How do I pay you for it?" That validation has turned into explosive growth. We've doubled our revenue in just the last 4 months alone, with >50 enterprise customers like Nestlé, Microsoft, and WeightWatchers trusting us to unlock deeper customer insights. All of this built on the backs of a truly special early team with 0 employee turnover. This funding round was led by 8VC, with participation from an incredible group, including: Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company, Y Combinator / Garry Tan, Adverb Ventures /April Underwood / Jessica Verrilli ), Alt Capital / Jack Altman , Rebel Fund, Genius Ventures, Ritual Capital, and many more. So what's next? We're scaling our engineering and go-to-market teams to build the world's most powerful agentic customer research platform. All focused on one mission: helping companies better understand humans. To our customers, investors, and team - thank you for believing in this vision. Now check out the video to see Outset in action, testing the video itself with real people!

Aaron Cannon

34,342 views • 1 year ago

"Our approach is to build products and conduct research that are in service of accelerated AI deployments. Our platform team builds tools and context primitives that enable faster deployment. Our research team builds frontier systems, including a state-of-the-art RL stack. We then take that research and product and forward-deploy with our customers to help deliver real value." Thanks Founders You Should Know for having us. Open roles at:

"Our approach is to build products and conduct research that are in service of accelerated AI deployments. Our platform team builds tools and context primitives that enable faster deployment. Our research team builds frontier systems, including a state-of-the-art RL stack. We then take that research and product and forward-deploy with our customers to help deliver real value." Thanks Founders You Should Know for having us. Open roles at:

Applied Compute

45,197 views • 4 months ago

Today I am introducing Eragon , your AI Operating System for work. Our goal is simple: Build the AI that can help you run your company from idea to IPO. In order to truly fix work, we need to solve the root problem. We all use tons of business apps from ERP to CRM to Product Analytics but we still have to endlessly switch, search, and export just to answer a single question. The bottleneck is not having more tools, it's the lack of a unified layer that connects and understands them all. That's why we built Eragon -Through MCP we connect to every business app. -Through custom agents, each tool gets its own intelligence. -And inside one workspace all you have to do is ask Eragon for any business insight: - "Walk me through our sales forecast and what deals are at risk." - "Which users hit paywall but didn't convert?" - "Where's the bottleneck in our factories this week?" Already, teams are cutting days of manual work into minutes. We're working with the fastest growing startups and some of the worlds largest enterprises. And we would love to work with you! Book a demo with us today and usher in the new era of vibe working.

Today I am introducing Eragon , your AI Operating System for work. Our goal is simple: Build the AI that can help you run your company from idea to IPO. In order to truly fix work, we need to solve the root problem. We all use tons of business apps from ERP to CRM to Product Analytics but we still have to endlessly switch, search, and export just to answer a single question. The bottleneck is not having more tools, it's the lack of a unified layer that connects and understands them all. That's why we built Eragon -Through MCP we connect to every business app. -Through custom agents, each tool gets its own intelligence. -And inside one workspace all you have to do is ask Eragon for any business insight: - "Walk me through our sales forecast and what deals are at risk." - "Which users hit paywall but didn't convert?" - "Where's the bottleneck in our factories this week?" Already, teams are cutting days of manual work into minutes. We're working with the fastest growing startups and some of the worlds largest enterprises. And we would love to work with you! Book a demo with us today and usher in the new era of vibe working.

Josh Sirota

99,769 views • 10 months ago