Harry O'Connor

Welcome 2026 Thiel Fellows! WHO ARE THEY? Victor Boyd: Birmingham, AL - @VictorWBoyd Cavalla is on a mission to get anything anywhere in under 5 hours. Starting by building autonomous forklifts, through to developing hypersonic highways. Samuel Carvalho: Recife, Brazil - @samuelclcc Praso is building the new infrastructure for wholesale commerce — powering procurement, credit, and workflow tools for SMBs across underserved areas in Brazil. Nick Dobroshinsky: Sammamish, WA - @NDobroshinsky EveryTicker is democratizing institutional-grade financial research across the entire U.S. stock market, including the thousands of smaller companies Wall Street ignores. Ishan Gupta: Kanpur, India - @ishangpta Juicebox is building an AI recruiter that helps companies make better hiring decisions. Agents that understand real skills and move hiring from guesswork to true meritocracy. Antoni Kiszka: Strzyżowice, Poland - @antoni_kiszka Derpetual is building the infrastructure to create a market for any asset — with leverage. Milan Lustig: Cold Spring Harbor, NY - @HighPriestOfSWO Opt32 is building modern compute infrastructure to put AI onboard objects in the physical world — from robots to cars and drones. Galen Mead: Chapel Hill, NC - @g413n Standard Intelligence is building aligned general learners, pretraining large models to actively explore and learn from the Internet. Aubrey Niederhoffer: New York, NY - @needaubrey Swoop is building the super app for Africa, starting with food delivery in Nigeria and expanding into financial services across the continent. Harry O'Connor: Cork, Ireland - @HarryOC493 Sentient Machines is a research lab building foundational models for robotics that generalize across tasks and environments. Alex Shieh: Salem, NH - @alexkshieh The Antifraud Company is a fraud bounty hunter defending American taxpayers with AI and investigative journalism. Claire Wang: Los Angeles, CA - @clairebookworm Claire is building biologically accurate simulations of entire nervous systems, starting with C. elegans. Developing a simulated brain that researchers can communicate with helps lay the foundation for brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Kyler Wang: Portland, OR - @kylerywang Action is an artificial intelligence company in stealth.

CJO Chief Jerkey Officer

@Sentdex @carlosdponx @chrisbolas Agreed, their hands are ideal. I think this style of the dex-3 style is the best of both worlds in terms of dexterity and robustness

@carlosdponx @Harryoc493 @chrisbolas I also don't value super nice hands, but I do want hands and enjoy that problem space. I just want them to have basic pick up and drop capabilities. Truly dont care if they can thread a needle. I just want them to grab stuff. I think sprouts hands look good. Same w/ Sunday

Wow, they really nailed the aesthetics. Would love to try deving on this. 2dof head prominent estop, wonder if also a remote estop. no pinchpoints. 50lbs. Appears to come with hands/dev friendly @ $50K. NYC based. Definitely one to watch.

Yeah it is a problem lol I think the hands issue is a general thing to be solved. When I was at ces I went to every gripper booth and asked “Every hand I’ve tried breaks after one impact have you done durability testing?” Every time I got the same answer: “no, no haha it’s much too early for this. BUT ITS GOT TACTILE SENSORS!!!!” ….

@Harryoc493 @chrisbolas @carlosdponx I do love my G1, but the G1 falls so damn hard, and the hands do NOT survive real usage, despite being absurdly expensive. When stuff does break on the G1, getting parts is a nightmare across the ocean. I do not think the H2 is coming with hands @ $50K, but that'd be interesting

Its a really nice design - it being soft and having no pinch points is awesome With that said. a H2 from Unitree EDU is $50k - that's 6' tall, (with hands? afair), 3/4 hours of battery life?, so its capable of essentially almost any task in house like counters and shelfs I really, really like the sprout design, I'd be willing to pay ~85k for a taller version so it could do shelf/countertop work, this seems a little sall especially for 50k, if it was like $20k I'd insta buy. The Kbot was an ideal size for something like this imo.

@Sentdex @Harryoc493 @carlosdponx definitely directionally correct

@Sentdex @carlosdponx A g1 slaughters both in terms of cost : performance Also a big + for the g1 since there are like 10k papers you can implement on it day one at this stage. None for the booster This bot looks so sick, it just needs to be 1/2 the price.

@carlosdponx thats 3.5' tall SIR! You can get a fully upgraded G1, with hands, maybe for apx that price, yes, but only if you're riding on a bulk order. Otherwise you're paying more. You cannot get 10 boosters w/ hands for this price. The comparable Booster is apx this price afaik, ~42K?

@KyleMorgenstein I largely agree, generally I try to avoid specific gait enforcement as much as possible. Imo this results in essentially a sub-optimal variant of expert cloning (this policy is dogshit - 200 iters. It's a very basic rew structure today while I debug imu issues on s2r)

@Harryoc493 there’s a spectrum, some are overly restrictive (all the phase based ones) but without them you often get behavior like this. I usually add them formulated around air time symmetry rather than around explicit gait timing which is much more flexible imo

@KyleMorgenstein I dont have an airtime reward or foot contact reward. I had that issue when I tried the g1 env a few months ago lol. This is why I largely dont like the hand crafted gait reward styles.

@Harryoc493 usually this indicates a problem with the gait/airtime reward

Dont make your robot jump, its not good

@campedersen Not at all it’s actually dragging it (and me lol) here a bit. You can see towards the end. It’s trained with and without a winch/stuff pulling it. I’m not finished training - that was an early test so keeping it on the winch for a while longer.

@Harryoc493 How much does the winch affect sim2real?

An electric horse you say? Dave's trying to bring me to his lair (100% RL, sim2real 60m of training)

A truly HISTORIC day! A BIG congratulations to Harry O'Connor (@Harryoc493) on taking delivery of the very first K-Bot humanoid robot. A great patriot and a very smart man, one of the all-time smartest, many are saying - he knows a winner when he sees one! People are saying this is a historic moment, one for the history books. TREMENDOUS!

@cixliv @Sentdex Dev kit msrp is 12.5k - you’d get a good discount at bulk and this is significantly less that what the ufc pay junior fighters apparently It really dosent seem like an issue at some level of scale?

@Harryoc493 @Sentdex Dev version of R1s will be $20K (ones you can send your own policies to) and partially plastic don’t think they will last very long. Sword fights would be better imo especially if they can use CV to block

We've had robots fighting as a live spectator sport since the early 2000s at scale and no one questioned the moral implications. But when you make the robots humanoids, people start to take issue. There's something interesting there.

@cixliv @Sentdex R1’s are 4990 (I can send you the spec sheet if you want) This is easily doable and you’d 10x your viewership with this than throwing a few slaps

@Harryoc493 @Sentdex If you want to pay for breaking them every match

@aaronistan Yes or no is that video a real robot? Prob worth the clarification

Something we spent a lot of time thinking about when designing Lume was how robotic technologies will fit in to people’s lives. If we do it right, it should simply disappear without adding friction/complexity to one’s life.

@AviSchiffmann “Perfect” 👌

San Francisco is perfect right now. I’ve never seen it so clean and beautiful, there’s not much to complain about anymore

@Sentdex Finally! Unitree never reply 😭

Idk who needs to see this, but the Unitree G1 with the back plate off:

💫 sf things 💫 > crackhead walked in > pulls fire alarm > walks out Free will is awesome