Matt Puchalski retweeted
From many of the talks I’ve attended and conversations I’ve had at CoRL, I think one of the biggest “threats” for ego data companies is synthetic.
Human video still matters, but simulation can now generate diversity at scale with a fraction of the operational overhead.
Human video still matters, but simulation can now generate diversity at scale with a fraction of the operational overhead.
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Matt Puchalski retweeted
93% robotics researchers and VCs today on the SF -> Austin flights
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Austin I am in you!
CoRL is shaping up to be one HECK of a week, DMs are open and I'll be running around town!
CoRL is shaping up to be one HECK of a week, DMs are open and I'll be running around town!
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the 4:20 flight to Austin still has some seats available for all you last-minute CoRL folks
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lmk if you need OTS stereo data
As more companies move into robotics and interest is at an all-time high, it’s a good time to reflect on where the data industry stands ahead of 2027.
TL;DR:
Mono is dead; almost nobody has stereo off the shelf, and tactile is the new frontier. x.com/i/article/2119…
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most hardware engineering is software engineering in disguise.
Bucket takes the CAD of your design and turns them into vision models for your manufacturing line!
Bucket takes the CAD of your design and turns them into vision models for your manufacturing line!
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Matt Puchalski retweeted
“Getting it manufactured still required several rounds of review and iteration.”
Design costs going to zero will make demand for profitable high mix, high vol production go to the moon
Valuations for manufacturers will follow.
Simple supply and demand.
Design costs going to zero will make demand for profitable high mix, high vol production go to the moon
Valuations for manufacturers will follow.
Simple supply and demand.
Two OpenAI team members worked with GPT-6 Astra to design a prototype device for talking to Codex in under a week, as a side project.
Astra designed the enclosure, circuit board, interface, and software. Getting it manufactured still required several rounds of review and iteration.
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Matt Puchalski retweeted
Today, Zipline raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation.
When we started Zipline, flying autonomously in the US was illegal. Which made it really hard to convince investors to give us money! But we were too naive to think that meant we shouldn’t try.
We started the company on a cow run-down construction trailers so that we could keep engineering, manufacturing, and flight test all unified and in one place. Hiring people from normal companies like Google was hard because we didn’t have a cafe or laundry service. But enough risk takers and rebels wanted to go on an insane adventure with us. They became the early team.
We decided to launch in smaller countries and focus on life-saving use cases. We hired incredible entrepreneurs and operators in Rwanda, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, and other countries. For eight years, Zipline expanded our service across Africa, serving thousands of hospitals and health facilities and reducing maternal mortality by 51%. Today, the network saves over 14k lives every year and is cash flow positive.
Last year, Zipline launched at scale in the US and the service exploded. We grew flight volumes about 100x over the last 18 months, and now make more than a million deliveries a year per metro. We’re now expanding with our partners to millions of deliveries per day. Normal families love having access to anything they need in 10-20 minutes, no matter where they live. Spend more time with loved ones and less time worrying about errands.
Zipline builds drone delivery that is silent and safe. No one wants to hear an extremely loud “swarm of bees” delivering to their backyard or their neighbor’s. Automated delivery needs to be insanely quiet, which guided the overall architecture of our technology delivering from 330 ft in the air. We are 6 times quieter than the closest competitor during delivery. Zipline also now has over 150m commercial autonomous miles (10x the rest of the industry combined) and no safety incidents. Neighborhoods should demand silent and safe delivery!
Today, Zipline is announcing two things. First, we just signed the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history to expand automated delivery nationally with Walmart, our first and biggest partner in the US. We’re starting by scaling to 300 supercenters throughout the country. Second, we’ve raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation from existing and new investors, led by Paradigm, WCM, and Layer.
Zipline was a hard company to believe in for the first ten years of our history. Investors didn’t think the company was “investable”. Most people didn’t even think Zipline was an economic venture. Thanks to those who have rooted for us along the way. To all of the tens of millions of customers and families who rely on Zipline day in and day out: thank you for helping us build the future. Zipline has grown more than @ryanzip, @keenanwyrobek, I, and all others at the company could have imagined.
There is a big opportunity to build a new layer of infrastructure for humanity over the coming years. We want to approximate teleportation. We can build a logistics network that connects and serves all people on earth. We can free human flourishing from the choking constraint of traffic and roads. There are no roads where we’re going. 🚀🌎
When we started Zipline, flying autonomously in the US was illegal. Which made it really hard to convince investors to give us money! But we were too naive to think that meant we shouldn’t try.
We started the company on a cow run-down construction trailers so that we could keep engineering, manufacturing, and flight test all unified and in one place. Hiring people from normal companies like Google was hard because we didn’t have a cafe or laundry service. But enough risk takers and rebels wanted to go on an insane adventure with us. They became the early team.
We decided to launch in smaller countries and focus on life-saving use cases. We hired incredible entrepreneurs and operators in Rwanda, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, and other countries. For eight years, Zipline expanded our service across Africa, serving thousands of hospitals and health facilities and reducing maternal mortality by 51%. Today, the network saves over 14k lives every year and is cash flow positive.
Last year, Zipline launched at scale in the US and the service exploded. We grew flight volumes about 100x over the last 18 months, and now make more than a million deliveries a year per metro. We’re now expanding with our partners to millions of deliveries per day. Normal families love having access to anything they need in 10-20 minutes, no matter where they live. Spend more time with loved ones and less time worrying about errands.
Zipline builds drone delivery that is silent and safe. No one wants to hear an extremely loud “swarm of bees” delivering to their backyard or their neighbor’s. Automated delivery needs to be insanely quiet, which guided the overall architecture of our technology delivering from 330 ft in the air. We are 6 times quieter than the closest competitor during delivery. Zipline also now has over 150m commercial autonomous miles (10x the rest of the industry combined) and no safety incidents. Neighborhoods should demand silent and safe delivery!
Today, Zipline is announcing two things. First, we just signed the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history to expand automated delivery nationally with Walmart, our first and biggest partner in the US. We’re starting by scaling to 300 supercenters throughout the country. Second, we’ve raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation from existing and new investors, led by Paradigm, WCM, and Layer.
Zipline was a hard company to believe in for the first ten years of our history. Investors didn’t think the company was “investable”. Most people didn’t even think Zipline was an economic venture. Thanks to those who have rooted for us along the way. To all of the tens of millions of customers and families who rely on Zipline day in and day out: thank you for helping us build the future. Zipline has grown more than @ryanzip, @keenanwyrobek, I, and all others at the company could have imagined.
There is a big opportunity to build a new layer of infrastructure for humanity over the coming years. We want to approximate teleportation. We can build a logistics network that connects and serves all people on earth. We can free human flourishing from the choking constraint of traffic and roads. There are no roads where we’re going. 🚀🌎
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Matt Puchalski retweeted
The year is 2030, everyone is either a tamagotchi or a receipt printer. If you REALLY want to, you can be a digital camera.
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you can avoid the bi-monthly Dogpatch morning rainstorm if you just...get to the office at 6:00AM
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Matt Puchalski retweeted
Tutor Intelligence CEO @joshgruenstein explains how GPT Astra can generate robotics simulations that previously required entire teams of engineers:
"It's a very good model. It understands spatial reasoning in a really special way that we haven't really seen with prior models."
also true of Opus 5.5. I think all the big labs are post-training on this shape of data now."
"Astra can build simulation environments very quickly that mimic what the robot actually experiences. To do simulation well in robotics, you needed teams of simulation engineers. That wasn’t something that could scale."
"Simulation is very good. You still need a robot. You need to be able to close the sim-to-real gap."
@tutorintel
"It's a very good model. It understands spatial reasoning in a really special way that we haven't really seen with prior models."
also true of Opus 5.5. I think all the big labs are post-training on this shape of data now."
"Astra can build simulation environments very quickly that mimic what the robot actually experiences. To do simulation well in robotics, you needed teams of simulation engineers. That wasn’t something that could scale."
"Simulation is very good. You still need a robot. You need to be able to close the sim-to-real gap."
@tutorintel
We raised a $75M Series B to deploy intelligent robots now, led by @a16z, with participation from @usv and @neo.
@tutorintel robots work real jobs across the United States, directed by human “tutors” and the foundation models we’ve trained on the work done. This round del training, robot manufacturing, and deployment into industry.
We’re in almost 4x as many sites as a year ago; nearly a third of this year’s deployments went to existing customers coming back for more; and we’re on track to have more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027.
Our mission is to proliferate robotics for the common good. If you want to make robots reliably do things others think are impossible, for people who’ve never had access to this technology, join us.
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everyone should go make their office listen to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, TIL not everyone knows this absolute BANGER
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Matt Puchalski retweeted
the first ever attritable missile to shoot a drone out of the sky @PerseusDefense
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Y Combinator changed my life. If you're in hardware, YC is the YC for hardware - and today's the last day to apply to the next batch.
Just do it!
Just do it!
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Matt Puchalski retweeted
Astra’s super promising and better at generalizing than anything I’ve seen publicly. And I agree it may offer a path. But if it offers a path, it kind of invalidates most all of the data collection going on.
But it’s not performing better than our general model in our lab, but we suspect we’re ahead of everyone right now. And distilling Astra into something that can operate at the performance we need in production may not be that easy, which is why people still argue system 1 performance is important.
Either way, whether the labs solve the latency bottlenecks, or our models solve system 1, as an industry I’m confident we’re going to have general models in 2-3 quarters.
And yes, the bottleneck was always going to be robust hardware and deployment. Always build to where the puck is going.
But it’s not performing better than our general model in our lab, but we suspect we’re ahead of everyone right now. And distilling Astra into something that can operate at the performance we need in production may not be that easy, which is why people still argue system 1 performance is important.
Either way, whether the labs solve the latency bottlenecks, or our models solve system 1, as an industry I’m confident we’re going to have general models in 2-3 quarters.
And yes, the bottleneck was always going to be robust hardware and deployment. Always build to where the puck is going.
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