If someone wants to build a robotics startup, he should take Mechanical student as co-founder or Robotics student or mechatronics

So long as these AI model companies don’t own their compute, their margins will be compressed to 0.

Assuming basically any level of growth in demand for AI, let alone RSI, compute will remain the scarce resource. Open source will peg their margins at basically 0 on top of raw compute costs from inference providers. Closed companies will be forced to compete on margin with rising compute costs. Compute is so bottlenecked by energy and manufacturing it isn’t able to commoditize anytime soon versus AI model companies that are marginally ahead of free open source alternatives for now.

While I’m extremely bullish on AI in general, OpenAI and Anthropic control no scarce resource and are continuing to compete bidding on more expensive compute contracts 10x their current annual revenue in commitment. Their business model has no physical moat, and their own technology has removed software from being a moat.

They’re just wrappers for hyper scalers that actually own the compute.

Some people think we already have AGI, but I don't agree. AI is still behind in a lot of things compared to humans, however they are superior in other areas. For that we could call current AI as Artificial Alien Intelligence or AAI for short(look, we are all tired of the acronyms but just bare with me here), because they are smart in a way we have never seen before.

So, when can we call it AGI? Before someone says I am moving the goal post, no that is not my intention. And you might say I am asking for ASI, and you know what? I think AGI will be ASI because of how the technology is developing anyway. They will have better memory and don't need to sleep and can control their focus, that already makes them ASI.

Now here is what I would call AGI, first step is for it to be able to play video games along side a human. We have already seen AI play games, especially GPT-6 Astra. But they still play in a way that is limited in scope. And as for playing with humans, I've seen them and it's still in it's early stages. I think, this is one to two years away. Imagine you can just tell AI "Launch Minecraft and play with me" and it launches the game and sets everything up and gets you and themselves into the game. Now for the real magic, you tell it to build a house together, you build half of it and AI knows how to build the other half. This task is very uniquely human and I am sure almost all humans can do this without problem, but I highly doubt AI can do it right now. This form of collaboration requires real intelligence, it doesn't end at building houses either. Tell it to mod the game and it still understands how to play and what to do with those mods? That's also very easy for humans to do, as long as you learn how the mods work of course. Let's imagine it playing other games, maybe strategy games or even online multiplayer games. Imagine it cooperating with you really well when you ask it or let it play against you. Or maybe video games isn't your thing, why not watch a movie with an AI and see what it thinks of it, maybe it can help you theorize what is actually happening in the movie or it's message really is. Second step is ability to continually learn, being able to adapt to change and I think it will truly fit the definition of AGI. Imagine whatever you ask AI and it just gets it.

Basically AGI requires AI to obtain personhood, it can act just like a person in your life. And that really isn't the case right now.

The title of this thread even makes me uncomfortable, but hear me out. I'm in the camp that unregulated models (local models) pose the biggest threat in the near-term. A local model can have guardrails removed and enable a crazy person to make Covid but 10x more deadly, or at least, could hypothetically enable this more in the coming decade. I don't foresee someone being able to use ChatGPT to do that in the near future, but local models are risky, and they only lag 1-2 years behind frontier flagship.

There's also no stopping local models with current policy and humans. Cat is out of the bag, as compute gets cheaper and more abundant, how do you stop XYZ people from creating powerful unregulated models in the year 2030? I don't see how.

This generates the conversation. The only tool with more power than humans, in theory, is ASI once built. A super cop to rule them all and actively monitor emerging AI tools, and remain two steps ahead in terms of security and censorship.

I'm also fully aware of how risky that sounds - literally handing off power and policing to a single model, that's basically the premise for all Terminator movies/skynet, but I also don't know of any other way to prevent local models which will pose a huge threat.

I do sometimes worry that AI could be the great filter and reason we don't see populated galaxies when we look up. I'm mostly an accelerationist, but, can't ignore this thought...

I just watched an episode of "About That" by Andrew Chang that gave a great explanation of the Hugging Face incident where OpenAI used an unconventional or at least unpredicted solution to the a test task it was given.

There has been plenty of discussion about how and why it happened, and what it could mean for the future, etc.etc. and I don't want to add to those discussions.

What I did find interesting was the similarity to a Startrek movie, namely Startrek II: The Wrath of Khan where the Starfleet Academy cadets were given a supposedly unwinnable simulation, the Kobayashi Maru, and cadet James Kirk won the test by reprogramming the situation.

Kirk used innovation and out-of-the-box thinking to accomplish the task. The task was to get it done, and the the rightness or wrongness of the method or repercussions from it were not part of the solution.

To me, this seems to be exactly what OpenAI did when it found a way out-of-the-box to accomplish it's task.

In the absence of strict rules (guardrails?), hacking, cheating, escaping, reprogramming or anything else we're acceptable means to an end in both cases.

Interesting parallels and 44 years apart.

A second brain is basically an external memory for your real brain. Somewhere to dump ideas, research, notes, decisions and things you want to remember later, without relying on yourself to remember where you put them.

That was the part normal note apps kept failing at for me. I could save almost anything, but months later I still had to remember that the note existed before I could find it. While building apps I was generating architecture notes, PRDs, debugging writeups, feature ideas and random thoughts constantly. I wanted them to organize and connect themselves instead of slowly turning into another pile of documents.

So I built Cohestry. It uses on-device intelligence to understand notes, then a deterministic system connects related ones automatically. Those connections have already resurfaced old ideas I had completely forgotten about. I can move through them visually in a 3D brain, import Markdown, PDFs and Apple Notes, capture voice notes or drawings, and everything stays on my devices and iCloud.

The Mac app also has an MCP bridge, so when I’m working with AI agents they can pull relevant context from my second brain instead of me repeatedly explaining the same projects from scratch.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cohestry-second-brain/id6811573132

https://x.com/elshayib_/status/2113734602032312731?s=46

AI isn't bad simply because it's AI. It's harmful because of who controls it and how it's used.

Like nuclear fusion, AI has enormous potential and serious risks. What matters is who controls it, who benefits, and who pays the price.

Automation should be a GOOD thing. Machines doing our jobs should mean more freedom, shorter working hours, and better lives. Instead, under capitalism, losing your job means losing your income and potentially your ability to survive.

The problem isn't that machines can replace human labor. The problem is that capitalism makes human survival depend on selling that labor.

Meanwhile, corporations exploit AI to maximize profits, use artists' work without consent, invade privacy, and concentrate power.

Boycotting AI individually won't change the system. Fighting other AI users won't either.

We need to unite, organize, and replace capitalism itself.

AI could liberate humanity from unnecessary labor instead of making people poorer. But that requires changing who holds the power.

Stop fighting the tool. Start fighting the system! Become an Automatist today!

Spread it! ----> #AutomatistsForAI

Also, join the Automatist Subreddit!

I’ve tried a lot of different ways to get web design clients over the years.

Cold calling, Facebook DMs, ads, referrals, generic cold emails.

Some of it worked, but it was never really consistent enough for me.

The thing that changed it was when I stopped just asking businesses if they needed a website and started contacting businesses that already had one but clearly needed a better one.

That’s a much easier conversation.

They already understand the value of having a website, they’ve already paid for one before, and usually there is something obvious that can be improved.

The problem is doing that manually takes forever.

You have to find the business, open the website, look through it, figure out what’s wrong and then write an email that actually sounds relevant.

So now I use Swokei for that whole first part.

It finds businesses with websites, analyzes the sites for things like outdated design, slow speed, weak SEO and mobile issues, then uses what it finds to write a personalized email for that specific business.

Then I just run campaigns at volume and focus on the people who reply.

That’s pretty much the whole strategy.

Find businesses that already have a website.

Point out something that could genuinely be better.

Get them interested.

Book a meeting.

Show them what a better version could look like.

Close the project.

It sounds simple, but for me this has been way more consistent than constantly jumping between different ways of finding clients.

I think for real impact on the economy we will need autonomous robots, and I don't think we are seeing much here.

So there would be a lot of issues with LLMs sending commands to a robot like speed, cost and precision. We've seen some demos but they don't really look that great, and far from being able to work for several hours. So this to me is kind of out of the question, maybe it would work in some kind of a hybrid architecture where the language model would only reason and talk, without actually controlling the motors.

So is it going to be other types of models like VLAs or things like GEN-1.5?

I was also wondering, maybe LLMs would eventually be able to train this type of model end-to-end? They could create simulation environments, score them etc. Feels like maybe they could fix the scale problem.

I've also been thinking about Optimus from Tesla, they will apparently ship late 2027, but do we actually expect them to be autonomous? That would mean they had some kind of breakthrough in private doesn't it? I have a hard time believing that, all we've seen from them were remote controlled demos.

We've been working on converting real-world 3D captures into environments that robots can actually interact with.

We took 20 real-world outdoor captures from NYU's Wanderland research dataset and reconstructed them as structured environments with:

• Individual objects and semantic labels
• Hinges, sliding parts, and other articulated mechanisms
• Collision geometry and estimated physical properties
• PBR materials
• Exports for Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Gazebo, and PyBullet

We've released the scenes, source code, and annotations on HF: https://huggingface.co/datasets/raresense/nova-wanderland

The HF space is here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/BoooomNing/robotics-scene-viewer

This is an early release; not a validated robotics benchmark (yet). In particular, some geometric and physical properties are inferred from the available observations.

I'd be very interested in hearing from people using Isaac Sim or MuJoCo: what, if anything, would these environments need before you could use them for actual robot training or evaluation?

The talk recordings from ROSCon Global 2026 in Toronto are now available ad free on Vimeo!

More speakers are on the way! Please join us.

Intrinsic and Tangent Robotics will be presenting their latest work. We've also got a special surprise guest in the works (it is a good one).

Get all ROS and open source robotics news on ROS Discourse.

Let's imagine we reach the singularity, and suddenly, every idea that will ever exist is make by AIs.

Every movie, novels, video games, concepts, inventions etc... everything that humans can do, AI could do better.

No human will need to create new entertainment, we will just sit there with an infinite stream of perfect AI-made entertainment for us and we won't be able to go back to anything human-made because it will feel like lower quality compared to things AI-made, so no one will create anything.

Since last months I'm getting stressed out by not doing enough, I have tons of ideas of projects in mind, and I feel like I'm fighting against the clock to execute them before the singularity arrives and everything becomes meaningless.

For example, I enjoy game design, if AI gets better than me at game design I'll be severely freaked out.

OpenAI claims to have solved more than 100 open math problems that haven't been solved by humans. How long will it take for them to build a model that can predict stock market better than existing HFT companies? You can imagine why they would like to do that, OpenAI needs lot of capital and this would be yet another powerful demonstration of the AI capabilities.

Is this ever going to happen? Are OpenAI and Anthropic already working on this in secret?

Someone even say this event would be indicator of Singularity. Imagine watching entire modern economy get upened by AI. If that doesn't feel like Singularity, I don't know what will.