South Park Commons

Long weekend means lots of time to think about what you might explore and build next @southpkcommons

If you're in that -1 to 0 exploration phase, apply @southpkcommons southparkcommons.com/apply

Your next personal trainer might be an autonomous drone. Watch @gabrinaka and Vasu demo "Quaddie,” a quadcopter that uses AI to track your squats, analyze your form in real-time, and yell at you if you're not going low enough.

Inspired by Wall-E. @asherjiang_, @botskar_, @rohanadwankar, @oliveoilwuhoo, and Aron wanted to build a robot that felt personal. Using OpenCV, "Mo" spots crumbs and actually gets sad about the mess before cleaning it up.

Hacking on hardware with a collaborative twist. Last weekend, 25+ teams came together to ship working prototypes at the intersection of intelligence and the physical world. Check out the winners below 🔽

@pham_blnh 🙌

we won the embodied ai hackathon at @southpkcommons last week this is how we did it 🧵

The top frontier labs are increasingly treating product and research as coupled. I've been hearing this time and time again from founders and product leaders from @LumaLabsAI @AnthropicAI @OpenAI and more.

Why does @gravicle think unified models are the future?

The last 5 years have been dominated by LLMs. @gravicle makes a compelling case for visual intelligence dominating the next 5. We discussed the journey from @southpkcommons, to @LumaLabsAI, to world models (what does this even mean!?). Enjoy! (00:00) Apple's LiDAR work seeded Luma's founding vision (05:05) - A free app was secretly a data collection operation (06:49) H100s made video generation stop feeling impossible (10:00) Most definitions of "world model" are simply wrong (14:37) Why unified models beat pure video scaling (20:03) Luma Agents and the end-to-end creative production loop (23:00) The knowledge gap no model can close alone (29:34) Blowing James Cameron's mind in five minutes (31:16) Why consumer video generation failed—and who it's actually for (35:23) - Product and research aren't independent things at a foundation lab

@adityaag @southpkcommons South Park Commons was formative. The -1 phase is underrated and SPC is the best place to do it. Grateful for the early belief, Aditya. Lots more to come.

Vmax is building an open-ended learning system that generates and optimizes itself on tasks that it creates, avoiding human bias that may corrupt optimal learning curricula. In PopuLoRA, we instantiate this as co-evolving populations of LLMs performing asymmetric self-play.

@feross @SocketSecurity @ThriveCapital @a16z @AbstractVC @CapitalOne Congrats! ⚡️

Today is a big day for @SocketSecurity. We just raised a $60M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @ThriveCapital with participation from @a16z, @AbstractVC, and @CapitalOne Ventures. Total funding is now $125M. Four years ago, we started Socket because open source dependencies were flowing into production faster than anyone could vet them. AI has massively accelerated that. Code is being written, shipped, and deployed before any human reads it. Security has to operate at that same speed. One data point from Thrive's diligence that I keep coming back to: they first discovered Socket because @cursor_ai, @OpenAI, and @AnthropicAI all independently told them it was the most important security tool they'd adopted for AI-driven development. Three of the most sophisticated AI companies converging on the same vendor unprompted. Since our Series B, Socket has grown to more than 20,000 organizations, protecting over 1.5 million repositories and blocking more than 1,000 supply chain attacks every week. The team is now over 100 people. Three out of five FAANG companies are Socket customers. So are the companies building the most ambitious AI products: @AnthropicAI, @cursor_ai, @xai, @figma, @vercel, @Replit, @scale_AI, @GustoHQ, @Mercadolibre, and @cribl_io, alongside Fortune 100s in financial services and global media. What we've shipped since the last round: • Socket Firewall blocks malicious packages at install time, before they reach a developer's laptop or CI pipeline. Free for everyone. • Reachability analysis via our acquisition of Coana, eliminating 50-80% of irrelevant vulnerability alerts by focusing only on CVEs that are actually exploitable. • Socket Certified Patches for remediating exploitable CVEs in seconds without waiting on upstream maintainers. • Coverage extending to browser extensions, editor extensions, MCP servers, and AI tools via our acquisition of @secureannex. When the Axios compromise hit, our detection systems flagged the malicious dependency within six minutes. Within 24 hours, more than 2,000 organizations onboarded to Socket to block it. Where the funding goes: deeper investment in Firewall, massively expanding Certified Patches, moving protection closer to every point of install across the developer toolchain, and new product launches pushing Socket into a category we haven't entered before. We're hiring across engineering, sales, customer success, and threat intel. ❤️ Thank you to our customers, investors, and the open-source community for your support. Together, we’re making software safer for everyone.

.@trq212 is a builder's builder. After research at MIT, exiting his company, raising millions for another, and exploring research threads as an SPC member, he's now on the team building Claude Code. He's coming back to @southpkcommons next week.

AI is coming to the physical world. We spent a weekend at @southpkcommons experimenting with getting software, hardware, and different form factors to collaborate.

The future is bright. We will have amazing things at the intersection of AI+Atoms.

Final demos coming soon! Weekend made possible thanks to @OpenAI, @awscloud, @rhobusiness, @huggingface, @ElevenLabs, @seeedstudio, @Solo__Tech, @droneforge, Realman, @formlabs, & @CooleyLLP

Scenes from this weekend's embodied AI hackathon 🤖

A big thanks to our partners @OpenAI, @awscloud, @rhobusiness, @huggingface, @ElevenLabs, @seeedstudio, @Solo__Tech, @droneforge, Realman, @formlabs, & @CooleyLLP for helping make this weekend happen. Final demos tomorrow: luma.com/hardware-hack-…

The robot takeover has begun... 1 day left to hack! 🤖