HARD MODE

March 6-8 200 participants Reimagine the future of AI x Hardware at MIT Media Lab

One week until our Physical AI evening at MIT Media Lab for BosTechWeek Join us: partiful.com/e/4wahZxSOBB3I…

Join us Thursday 28th May for an evening of physical AI at MIT Media Lab ⚙️

HARD MODE projects have now racked up nearly 3M views across all platforms! Bringing some of the best ones to SF this week for Code with Claude. Would love to chat to people interested in Hardware x AI. Who should I meet?

@IntuitMachine This was developed at HARD MODE – our Hardware x AI hackathon. Great to see this work resonating with so many people!

Meet Human Operator from MIT Media Lab: a wearable that lets AI temporarily take control of your hand using electrical muscle stimulation. Watch it crush piano, draw perfectly, and mix cocktails like a pro — all from a simple voice command. “I gave an AI a body.” This isn’t sci-fi. This is tomorrow. #HumanOperator #MITMediaLab

Great work by the Human Operator team! Developed at our first HARD MODE hackathon ⚙️

This is what I woke up to

Anyone, anywhere, can now move intelligent things in the physical world. We haven't really decided what this means, or what to do with it, but it's already happening and it goes hard.

We just confirmed the winners of @hardmodemit over on Devpost! You can check out some of the winning projects here: hardmode.devpost.com/project-gallery

What if AI didn’t just control robots but it could also give humans new physical skills? At the MIT @medialab @hardmodemit hackathon, we explored using #AI + electrical muscle stimulation (#EMS) for AI to temporarily control your body, enabling people to do things they normally can't do, like playing instruments, fixing their car, and making new cocktails. 🍸 🏆 Won the Learn track 🏆

We are still feeling the energy of the past week's @hardmodemit hackathon! Special shout-out to the team behind it, all the volunteers, sponsors and of course - hackers!

One week since demo day at HARD MODE; the first Hardware × AI Hackathon at MIT Media Lab. 40+ Teams and 200+ participants building physical AI. One team gave an AI a (human) body. Others went SOFT MODE and used clay as an interface. There were plushies powered by AI, an AI that questions rather than answers, new interfaces using Pepper’s ghost, intelligent objects that live their own lives and much more… Huge thanks to our sponsors and judges from Anthropic, Qualcomm, and Akamai Technologies, whose CTO Robert Blumofe not only supported us but showed up, spoke, and sat on the jury. Grateful also to Bambu Lab, E14 Fund, Institute of Foundation Models, and all our amazing volunteers! More projects, photos, and videos coming soon. hardmode.media.mit.edu

Can tech help us fight back against the attention economy? At MIT’s HARD MODE Hackathon we built Feral Focus — an ambient AI attention companion that lives on your desk. 🏆 Won the Reflect track. Built with @MateoFerfer007 @safiware @realxdd44 Big thanks to @cyrusclarke for organizing such a hardcore event 🔥⚙️ @AHA_medialab @hardmodemit #HARDMODE

This weekend I led the organisation of HARD MODE: the first Hardware x AI hackathon at MIT Media Lab. I’ve been convinced for a while that physical AI is the big opportunity and that the most transformative applications of intelligence won’t live on a screen. They’ll be physical, embodied, sensory and in forms we haven’t seen before. HARD MODE is part of my vision of that future and a signal that the community around it already exists. 200+ engineers, hackers and researchers showed up to MIT Media Lab this weekend and spent 48 hours building towards this vision. 40+ amazing projects across 6 tracks. We had incredible support from Anthropic, Qualcomm, Akamai, Bambu Labs and more. Best of all I got to work with a great team and we managed to pull this off against all odds in 6 weeks. It was amazing to see something I had dreamt about come to life and give so much energy and inspiration to so many people. This is just the beginning. ⚙️

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cc @medialab @AHA_MediaLab Video credit: Footage by: @johary Edit by: @cyrusclarke and @johary

48h. 200+ participants. 40+ projects. One mission: Re-imagine what AI can be. This weekend we hosted HARD MODE: Hardware x AI Hackathon at MIT Media Lab. Hackers from around the globe came to build intelligent physical systems that take AI out of the screen and into the world

@hardmodemit HARD PREP 🦾

HARD at work — hackathon starts tomorrow ⚙️

HARD MODE started from a feeling: AI has collapsed the gap between imagination and physical reality, and most people haven’t noticed yet. Stuff that used to take months now takes days. I was living that. So we decided to create a space for this energy to take root. HARD MODE is a hackathon for builders who want to combine AI and physical things: hardware, embodied AI, physical systems, at a moment when making has never been more powerful. And apparently it’s the right time: 0 —> 600 applicants (closed early) 0 —> 15k followers on IG Sponsorship deals with Anthropic, Qualcomm, Akamai and a stack of others backing us. We have ~ 200 absolutely cracked builders joining us from MIT, Harvard, across the US and beyond. Craziest thing is we started working on this in Jan and built it while doing academic research. You can just make things happen. That’s the whole point of being here. We start in two days…