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

Aren't there ways to legally forbid reusing anything you made for war like purposes?

Really appreciate it :)

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

Sorry maybe I should have been more specific. I had Unitree in mind, last time I checked the humanoid with no hands was $20k and each hand was an extra $20k. Yours seems to ship with 2 hands for extra $1k (surprisingly cheap, which is great of course!). I was curious to read more about what the hands are capable of doing.

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

Great. Another problem for us to solve, how defend ourselves from your robots.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

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

nice! For manipulation taskes, is kscale planning to train in sim mostly and transferring to real, or is some imitation learning used, like with gloves and such? maybe both?

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.

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.

I like the K-Sim Gym. Im looking forward to fiddle with it a bit when I have more time. I could see that you get something usefull out of people competing on your leaderboard xD

It's my hot take that the next big ML breakthrough needs s.th. that learns from its own actions in an environment, so this goes in the right direction imo.

On the other hand a lot of big companies struggle with self driving cars even though they predicted to build this years ago. Also probably all big AI companies work on AI for autonomous robots. Where do you intend to do s.th. different to get a shot at competing with them (when they have so much more capital)?

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.

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 spend a lot of time thinking about it day-to-day because of my disability and reliance on multiple disability support workers, as well as living with my husband who is also disabled, so if you ever wanted to talk to someone with disability support workers feel free to ask.

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.

I'd say if you have a marketing problem do whatever the heck you can to get Rory Sutherland to take a look at your product, the man is a force of nature when it comes to unconventional marketing and from him I've learned the crucial distinction between relational and transactional capitalism.

And if you ever make it to the (multi)unicorn status because of him, don't forget yours truly. :)