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Diego Prats | 🤖
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Diego Prats | 🤖
@mexitlan
Building in the open for physical AI and robotics. CEO/Founder at @hapticlabsai prev. Eng PhD dropout @usc, @harvard
San Francisco, CA Katılım Nisan 2011
193 Takip Edilen4.9K Takipçiler
I really enjoy the videos by @welchlabs .
I just caught this intro video into the recent history of robotics models and VLAs.
I particular enjoy how across the videos @welchlabs tends to shows the lineage of models and how each advancement led to the next.
youtu.be/2mrGMMmrVNE?si…
YouTube
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Diego Prats | 🤖 retweetledi
I've updated my zobotics website with a "Looking for opportunities" section. Still vibing in circles on the wording, but this is the gist.
If you would like to chat or our previous chat didn't happen for whatever reason I've added a Cal link.
Link in my profile.
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Watching some tech incumbents get caught in the swamp of AI slop transitions while small teams 10-100x their output puts many incumbents in surprisingly vulnerable positions.
“Agents will end up hurting large organizations more than high performing individuals or small orgs. … A trait you find in all high performing people is the ability to error correct, and they have mostly been good at seeing when slop is slop”
george hotz archive@geohotarchive
The Eternal Sloptember geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/u…
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The placebo effect of “being on an elite team” is underrated. At an SF dinner with founders, the topic came up of how some NYC quant funds and SV neo labs “accept less than 1% of already top-tier applicants.” A PhD described how at their Anthropic was so hard it spoke about the intensity of Anthropic.
Bet places could randomly pick 0.1% of applicants, tell them they’re elite, and get a large output increase as a team. Embrace the placebo. Maybe this helps me understand old school military esprit de corps.
I am reminded how I watched high school seniors transform or become more ambitious once they get into elite colleges (but before they attend!). Saw same for college seniors who got elite job offers, doctors after matched but before they start, etc…
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Diego Prats | 🤖 retweetledi
Again robotics software sucks. Its so bad. Part of what makes it so bad -- and what makes stuft like ROS useful -- is the amount of boring middleware code you need to write between sensors, processes, etc. Coding models make it so much easier to work with, its wonderful.
tian/天@xtbot
I asked Codex to set up ROS middleware, configure a CSI camera, benchmark Gemma 4 models on my Jetson Orin Nano, adapt an OpenClaw-style runtime for VLM + reasoning (“Robotclaw” as I call it), and even build an iOS app to stream LiDAR, camera, GPS, and IMU data from an old iPhone to my robot rover. It’s honestly wild how capable these coding agents are now, and how much time they save. I even “write” way more tests now because the marginal cost is so low.
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Diego Prats | 🤖 retweetledi
Hiring is broken because a LinkedIn resume only captures a fraction of a person's story. The exceptional builders that founders actually want to hire rarely keep their profiles up to date. Their value is in their proof of work: Github, X, blogs.
Our founders are constantly asking us: "How do we find more profiles like this?" So we vibecoded Lookalike - a tool designed to discover talent by matching an entire digital persona.
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@xanderjanz You know… I have not experienced or seen this as much, but you are not the first who has said this to me. I will keep eyes open for this. Thank you
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I think you're right, but there's also an inverse problem, where way to many robot shops are too RL-pilled, and trying to ship products trained on 15 year old technology. And not realizing the frontier training (VLA, WM, Ego) is 1000s of times more capable if they would adopt it.
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IMO when it comes to physical AI, SV is a bit too frontier-pilled.
Don't get me wrong, frontier labs are VERY important to the ecosystem, but I think there are many problems in agriculture, construction, even consumer that can be solved with off-the-shelf hardware and don't need 99.999% success rates, and I suspect they are not as interesting to discuss so they are (accidentally) under-rated.
What we really need are entrepreneurs who UNDERSTAND the business case and pain point, and are willing to assemble the product, get costs down, and pound the pavement for distribution.
I meet many robotics companies that fit the bill, and I'd argue this is an underrated real bottleneck for robotics: people fighting the good fight.
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@numairarazzak I can sense a deeper insight here, so I thought I’d encourage you to elaborate. Can you help me understand what you are thinking?
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@mexitlan 100% agreed and think this issue bleeds into software too. Big believer in vertical AI businesses that build shit that people actually want at these companies
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@KuphDev I am far from the authority to tell someone to move or not, but speaking for myself:
I have found opportunities in CA I would not find in most places.
I have found opportunities in SF Bay Area I would not find in San Diego or Los Angeles.
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@KuphDev This actually reminds me of this:
Diego Prats | 🤖@mexitlan
Pattern I keep seeing: physical AI startups with software/math/AI founders in SF, NYC, or Austin (eg VC-friendly areas) recruiting remote founding hardware engineers in the Midwest. CMU is the OBVIOUS hub, but I've met teams with folks in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan. Tons of latent CNC/CAD/logistics talent there with no idea coastal startups are hunting for them.
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Diego Prats | 🤖 retweetledi
I learned so much about physical AI from a short call with one of my favorite cracked builders @0xChrisM and now I’m hooked. 🔥
Will follow along as the @HapticLabsAI team builds Festivus, which makes it easy for anyone to understand how to give AI a physical body!
Chris@0xChrisM
At #FestivusAI, we’re building a catalog for robotics. Our first milestone was simple but important: gather scattered robotics data from #HuggingFace, #GitHub, vendor sites, tinkerer blogs, and all the odd little corners of the internet where useful knowledge tends to live. We credit sources clearly. No mystery meat data. Then we brought everything into one searchable platform, so people can actually find what they need without opening 47 tabs and questioning their life choices. Now we’ve added an AI agent that makes pages easier to edit, improve, and keep current. Think Wikipedia for #robotics, but faster to contribute to, easier to maintain, and built for the people actually doing the work. And yes, our code and data are #opensource too. Why? Because that’s how innovation leapfrogs. People build faster when the map is shared.
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Diego Prats | 🤖 retweetledi
@mexitlan Rather true!
I liked the ai-native neo-integrator as a category
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“Fun” fact: when VCs reach out to talk to “get smart about the physical AI space”, I often elicit more interest when I mention some arXiv paper than the fascinating role of systems integrators in the industry.
Weirdly, the less technical the VC the MORE the arXiv or latest droid demo seems to engage.
I strongly suspect SV doesn’t appreciate their role in robotics and physical AI deployment in real world. A friend’s theory is:
A. “From a distance, system integrators look closer to electricians and plumbers 👩🔧👨🔧 than they look to Stanford research PhDs 🧑💻👩💻.”
B. “System integrators don’t raise monster rounds” 😛
This is why I always find my conversations with @avizurlo to be very enlightening. He goes deep into this important part of the ecosystem.
avi@avizurlo
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