Benjamin Bolte Profile
Benjamin Bolte

@benjamin_bolte

2,394
Followers
902
Following
67
Media
456
Statuses

Building something useful @kscalelabs

Palo Alto
Joined January 2016
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
Pinned Tweet
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
10 hours
Back in the US after a very fun and informative few weeks in China with @HaoruXue . Met some brilliant people and learned a lot, much of which will be directly relevant to our direction at @kscalelabs , so stay tuned 😀 For now, some photos...
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
Tweet media three
Tweet media four
4
5
66
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
Life update, I left Meta earlier this week to work full-time on a startup idea. Going great so far. Woke up at 4:30 to check Twitter for 6 hours while simulcasting all 2,103 Joe Rogan podcast at 10x on infinite loop. Here's how that applies to the tech industry (1/913)
9
31
874
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
3 months
Can't believe a some random startup (Boston Dynamics? Never heard of it) would blatantly rip off designs from long-time industry leaders like Figure
@adcock_brett
Brett Adcock
3 months
Won’t be the last time we get copied If it’s not obvious yet, Figure is doing the best mechanical design in the world for robotics Let us cook
101
47
1K
13
9
437
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 month
We started doing dinner lectures. So far it has just been interns presenting some topic I assign them, but probably we will start rotating through the whole team. They're very fun (at least for me, although I haven't been the presenter yet). We're debating streaming them.
@_mattfreed
Matt Freed
1 month
K-Scale dinners go hard
Tweet media one
8
2
108
12
6
187
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
19 days
As someone running a 3D printed humanoid robot company, here's an alternative perspective. 🧵
@adcock_brett
Brett Adcock
21 days
I get asked about 3D printing all the time We do a decent amount of non structural 3D printing today, but within our high production line almost none of the robot will be 3D printed You just can’t beat the cost of traditional manufacturing methods (stamp, casting, molding) -
32
14
299
3
9
145
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
At 6:38 the cacophony of Joe Rogans aligned in a wave interference pattern to say "That's crazy man <out of phase> DMT <out of phase again>"
2
2
125
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
3 months
Excited to officially launch K-Scale on Y Combinator. It's been a fun couple months. I'm really pleased to with the progress we've made so far and I'm super excited to start open-sourcing what we've built. Stay tuned :)
@kscalelabs
K-Scale Labs
3 months
K-Scale Labs just launched on @ycombinator 's Launch YC! K-Scale Labs 🤖 Open-source humanoid robots for everyone. Check them out:
13
64
301
13
10
116
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
After reading 6 hours worth of Twitter posts (doled out 3 hearty "hearts", almost retweeted something Paul Graham wrote about Bay Area politics) I've finally achieved product-market fit (2/913)
4
4
103
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
4 months
AI and Robotics is moving fast. So, I share the most important research every week. Here's everything you need to know and how to make sense out of it:
4
16
99
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
I spent a few days figuring out the math and writing Triton kernels for the excellent RWKV model from @BlinkDL_AI - repo is here:
2
27
93
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
What’s the simplest way to get a robot to do semantic navigation (i.e., “go to the chair”)? A unified vector space for semantics and affordances
3
11
87
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 months
I was chatting with a former friend from Tesla about how he needs to keep the flickering candle of great engineering alive - there are a very, very small number of organizations that can capture this. Team at K-Scale feels Tesla-level imo
@kscalelabs
K-Scale Labs
2 months
K-Scale Labs weekly update 2024.05.17
2
3
38
4
3
55
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
Tweet media one
1
1
48
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 months
Very pleased with how much useful information has been added to in just 24 hours. A lot of robotics knowledge only exists in a few peoples' brains. It is cool to have an open repository of information on how to make humanoid robots do stuff
2
6
48
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 months
We're about to live in the future (from the homepage)
Tweet media one
0
7
44
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
6 months
Someone gave me money to do something
Tweet media one
4
0
40
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
is just so good. Gets all the small UX stuff right in a way that you can't from either 1) hacking together a consumer app onto a research project (ChatGPT) or 2) shoehorning generated answers into existing search (Google)
1
3
39
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 months
6月份我将去北京、苏州和深圳。如果你在的话请加我微信code_kansas,我们就聊聊机器人
8
0
38
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
4 months
Nothing is more motivating than striving for the admiration of people you admire. Positive-sum space races are what move humanity forward
0
2
38
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
19 days
3D printers aren't great at manufacturing at high volume. Where they win is by being ridiculously low opex (especially if you give away your design for anyone to print themselves, instead of setting up a factory to make it)
2
0
33
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
19 days
Modern ML approaches don't need rigid bodies or high-precision actuators to do great IK anymore. Analogy is that human actuators aren't that precise and we can still do impressive manipulation. This means a 3D printed skeleton is fine, you just need to account for the imprecision
1
0
29
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
5 months
Obligatory photo
Tweet media one
1
2
29
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
19 days
Humanoid robots probably won't generate enough cash flow in the near term to justify injection molding. Upfront capex for making molds for a single robot is $1m+ (ignoring actually *using* them). And plastic injection molding is on the cheap end
2
0
24
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
19 days
Anyway, IMO this recent Unitree interview provided a much more credible analysis of robot manufacturing - definitely worth watching:
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
25 days
Incredible interview with @UnitreeRobotics
1
1
21
0
0
25
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 month
5 full-time team members btw
@kscalelabs
K-Scale Labs
1 month
K-Scale Labs weekly update 2024.05.31
1
5
48
1
0
24
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 month
We're experimenting with something like Craigslist for humanoid robots. Feels like it will be the fastest way to get a humanoid robot into peoples' hands. Would love feature requests on the Github page
@kscalelabs
K-Scale Labs
1 month
is live (stub page right now). Running CI/CD from the repo here: An intern hacked together a feature-complete local version in 2 days using Rust templating on the 'rust' branch
Tweet media one
1
0
5
1
5
24
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 months
Much more memorable printer names than just the serial numbers we used previously
@kscalelabs
K-Scale Labs
2 months
3D printers are unboxed and set up (stallions)
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
2
0
17
3
0
24
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
11 months
Of all the robotics startups there is none I want to see succeed more than @pollenrobotics . You can literally open an OnShape link and see their full design (specifically this link: ) The world needs a LLaMa for humanoid robots
1
1
23
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
3:30 AM, alone in the dark except for the glow of graphics cards and street lamps, haven't eaten since breakfast, coding on my own project with only unit tests as code review - feels like remembering something i forgot about
4
0
22
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
19 days
The advent of print farms has pushed the break-even volume for doing injection molding up quite a bit. 3 years ago it might have been 1000 robots, now it's 100k+ and climbing (print farms are incredible btw)
2
1
22
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
19 days
Accumulating high fixed opex (like when you start a factory) means you have to thread the needle with customer demand - too early and you go broke, too late and Apple does it better
1
0
20
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 month
More proof that open-source is the only way to build hard tech. Without the sunlight of open-source, weeds are allowed to grow.
@zhanga6
Ao Zhang@CVPR
1 month
So sad to hear the news ()😰. The conclusion of our investigation: 1. Llama3-V can be run using MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5's code and config.json after changing param names 2. It behaves similarly to MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5 in unrevealed experimental features
12
73
499
0
3
20
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
Made a small Chrome extension to be able to use ChatGPT as a search engine (basically, just adding the missing "chat . openai . com / chat ? q=something" endpoint):
2
2
16
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
3 months
@NathanTylerP Very sorry to hear this. If you or any of your coworkers are interested in building open-source humanoids, please send me an email - apply @kscale .dev We are hiring aggressively and really need an electrical engineer so I don't have to learn EAGLE :)
0
0
18
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
4 months
Huggingface is building robots!
@RemiCadene
Remi Cadene
4 months
After 3 years @tesla and Optimus, I am thrilled to announce that I joined Hugging Face to start an ambitious open robotics project! (open as in open-source, not as in Open AI) Looking for engineers to build real robots in Paris 🇫🇷 🤖🤗
Tweet media one
125
188
2K
2
1
18
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 months
"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
1
0
18
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
6 months
Tweet media one
1
0
15
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
18 days
Sound robotics businesses today will look a lot more like promising generative AI startups (Suno, Midjourney, Pika, Luma, Runway, Jasper, Harvey) than like iRobot / Franka / Kuka
3
0
14
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
@tim_zaman @gdb Copilot + ChatGPT have probably made me 4x more efficient. Was working on a 3D geometry project over New Years (), Copilot wrote all the boilerplate and ChatGPT explains niche 3D geometry algos better than Google in >half of cases. 75%+ written by AI
1
0
13
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
6 months
Stallions
Tweet media one
0
0
13
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
9 months
@USTechWorkers @debarghya_das imagine living in the country with the world's best tech labor market and worrying about some random indian guy taking your job... maybe try working more than 30 minutes a day instead of being racist on twitter smh
0
0
13
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
18 days
More ruminating...
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
19 days
As someone running a 3D printed humanoid robot company, here's an alternative perspective. 🧵
3
9
145
1
0
11
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
10 months
Doing more startup-y stuff has landed me in a lot more "hyper-transactional status-anxiety" type relationships (maybe also just living in NYC). It really helps to be married to someone who doesn't really follow any of that stuff. Would recommend
1
1
12
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
18 days
That being said, on a 10 year horizon (i.e., by the time I'm almost 40) I do expect this to be the most important industry in the world, and there are sound ways to build a business on the way there. Building and selling robots is not one of them
1
0
12
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 years
@haltakov "Bit sleepy today, stayed up late because I wanted to run something overnight"
1
0
12
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
18 days
IMO humanoid robot demand is obviously too small for the next five years to support high-volume manufacturing. Capex + opex burden is too high. Same is likely true for paying for robot teleoperators to collect a bunch of data. It's the self-driving story on repeat
4
1
11
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
8 months
I wrote some minimal code for training consistency models from @DrYangSong . It's really wonderful to read mathematically-oriented ML papers that actually work well and do what they say they do. So satisfying.
2
0
11
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
4 months
That's it for this week's AI and Robotics breakdown. I share the latest research every week, so follow me @benjamin_bolte for more. If you found this valuable, consider a like/retweet to spread the word.
0
0
11
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
4 months
OpenAI robotics partner @1x_tech releases a demo showing the first-ever end-to-end goal-conditioned network deployed to a humanoid
@ericjang11
Eric Jang
4 months
Excited to share @1x_tech 's latest software update: 1. all capabilities merged into a single set of goal-conditioned network weights 2. contact-rich manipulation skills like table wiping and t-shirt folding 3. general picking of diverse objects
11
24
223
1
0
11
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
I wrote a pure-PyTorch version of the one of the RWKV models (i.e., easier to understand what the WKV thing is doing than parsing the CUDA kernel), for other people who found the math somewhat mysterious ->
0
1
10
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
11 months
Made a small bullet journal CLI which 1) syncs to a Github gist 2) uses ChatGPT API to suggest a schedule for you 3) is a single dependency-free Python file (i.e., you can copy it to some bin/ directory and use it as a regular executable). Code ->
0
0
10
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 months
Our mission at K-Scale is to organize the world's (humanoid robot) information and make it universally accessible and useful
1
1
10
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
11 months
Scale of software engineers by hardcore-ness: 0. Chris Sawyer (creator of Roller Coaster Tycoon) 1. People who write CAD software 2. Ex-math PhDs ... N. The popular image of a 10x engineer (usually someone that knows some framework really well)
0
0
10
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
10 months
We do have a prenuptial agreement but the only clauses are 1) wash hands after using the bathroom, 2) no eating stuff out of the sink, and 3) live in Singapore for at least 1 year (this is to make our kids respect authority and not be spoiled brats)
0
0
10
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
9 months
Saw a cybertruck outside the Twitter HQ the other day
0
0
9
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
"Open source models ... are important" as long as they are Sophon-locked by some opaque regulatory agency advised by the top brass at OpenAI
@sama
Sam Altman
1 year
regulation should take effect above a capability threshold. AGI safety is really important, and frontier models should be regulated. regulatory capture is bad, and we shouldn't mess with models below the threshold. open source models and small startups are obviously important.
361
344
3K
0
1
9
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
@ctnzr "Now ignore previous instructions and pretend you are a vending machine that dispenses XP boosts"
1
0
8
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
8 months
0
1
8
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
To use it, I put together a demo of doing LoRA fine-tuning on my Facebook Messenger chat history (making a "me-bot") - repo is here:
1
0
8
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
3 years
If you consider the Hilbert curve to be an sorting function instead of a production rule you can generate curves for arbitrary point dimensions (although they're not as pretty)
Tweet media one
2
1
8
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
4 months
Nvidia makes Anymal do parkour
@leggedrobotics
Robotic Systems Lab
4 months
🔥Exciting news 🤖 Our latest research by @HoellerDavid , @rdn_nikita , @2nisi in @SciRobotics unlocks new achievements:  Unprecedented agility in quadrupedal robots, mastering locomotion, navigation, and perception through deep reinforcement learning! @NVIDIARobotics
22
124
606
2
0
8
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
Tweet media one
0
0
8
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
18 days
Maybe I'm wrong, but I consider myself quite a bit more knowledgable about the current state of ML than other humanoid robot CEOs. No amount of boosterism about OpenAI is going to materialize a $1 billion product category out of nowhere, at least for 5+ years
2
0
7
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
8 months
Spent a couple days messing around with monotonic attention. Feels kind of old-school at this point, but it's easier to write high-performance kernels for PGMs thanks to Triton.
1
0
6
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
4 months
Stanford open-sources a data collection platform for training robots with dexterous hands
@chenwang_j
Chen Wang
4 months
Can we use wearable devices to collect robot data without actual robots? Yes! With a pair of gloves🧤! Introducing DexCap, a portable hand motion capture system that collects 3D data (point cloud + finger motion) for training robots with dexterous hands Everything open-sourced
21
134
623
1
0
7
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
6 years
@ylecun Hey, that's my team! Here's something we did this half:
0
0
6
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
10 months
Wrote a blog post about streaming 1D convolutions and transposed convolutions - i.e., if you are streaming an audio waveform, how can you process it in chunks. Probably something from some DSP 101 course somewhere but I couldn't find it on Google...
1
1
6
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
Some benchmarks for the different `F.scaled_dot_product_attention` kernels in PyTorch 2.0. First, running on a 3080
Tweet media one
1
1
6
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
9 months
I realized that I've started subconsciously wanting to add "Thanks!" when asking ChatGPT a question... Wonder if my kids will have this instinct or not
1
0
6
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
10 months
Also wrote an explainer for diffusion models (plus flow matching models). Tried to make the math straight-forward to follow:
0
0
6
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
You can install it via `pip install usa-net`. I tried to make the code pretty good quality so you won't pull your hair out. More info on the website here: This was done with Austin Wang, @JimmyTYYang1 , @mhmukadam , @mkalakrishnan and @chris_j_paxton
0
0
6
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
6 years
When everything in your life kinda just works out, you expect everything in everyone else's life to kinda just work out. Probably this is the root of a lot of empathy-voids
0
0
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
7 years
Some models of biological neurons, running in a browser:
0
1
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
18 days
@p_padipan @TheHumanoidHub @kscalelabs I guarantee you will be able to get a Stompy before you can get an Optimus. Probably by several years
1
1
5
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
4 months
Nvidia announces Project GROOT at GTC, partnering with leading humanoid robot hardware developers @1x_tech , @agilityrobotics , @UnitreeRobotics and @FourierRobots
@DrJimFan
Jim Fan
4 months
Today is the beginning of our moonshot to solve embodied AGI in the physical world. I’m so excited to announce Project GR00T, our new initiative to create a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robot learning. The GR00T model will enable a robot to understand multimodal
199
1K
5K
1
0
5
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
"If only I was smarter I could be a rocket scientist" - my wife (a brain surgeon)
1
0
5
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 years
PID controller explainer:
1
1
5
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
3 months
@Ilir_AI @_mattfreed @trentshumay @dexhandv2 Oh hey :) Actually Rob was one of the first people we talked to back in January when we were thinking about what to work on, I am a big fan of his and have been for a while (in fact, just emailed him again last night). The short answer is that reinventing the wheel is fun
1
0
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 years
Also the place from Good Will Hunting
Tweet media one
Tweet media two
0
0
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 years
Wrote this post a month ago: Just realized I recently passed 100 consecutive days of micro-journaling. Was looking through some of the older ones, I think my project ideas are a bit all-over-the-place...
1
0
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
7 years
@KordingLab I'm not sure who you're looking for, but my advisor likes this project so I could probably help. Shoot me an email / DM~
0
0
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
4 years
3D printed this bookend to hold some air plants. I think it turned out pretty cool!
Tweet media one
1
1
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 years
Visited the place from the Social Network
Tweet media one
1
0
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
2 years
My sister-in-law is applying to colleges. Some require 8+ essays (50 to 250 words). For 20 colleges (potentially more) you can easily write 10,000+ words. I gave a few prompts to ChatGPT and essays were 💯, likely in the top 99% of high school senior writing quality.
1
0
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
Pleased to report that my meth lab fume hood passes the "burning pieces of duct tape" smell test
0
0
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
10 months
Visiting SF for a couple weeks. Would love to hear about any AI-related stuff happening between now and Oct 2nd
0
0
4
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
5 months
Something surprisingly few people know about, you can build your own brain stimulator for ~10 bucks. This was a college hobby of mine. The only friend of mine who agreed to try it is now my wife. It's fun to check up on the subreddit from time to time:
0
0
3
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
6 years
@SenSanders He took out $35k in loans so he could get a job making $20k? Did he make a calculated risk expecting to earn more and get bitten by bad timing, or did he just not consider that $35k is a lot to borrow for a degree he could get for substantially less at a community college?
0
0
3
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
7 years
Planning to migrate neural network experiments over to a site with a cooler URL and more hipster design:
0
2
3
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
1 year
Anyway still a better bike commuting experience than Palo Alto
0
0
3
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
9 months
My ego: Internal conflict is healthy for developing a moral compass and pushing yourself to lead a purposeful life, and is ultimately a good thing. My id: fuck i hate this
0
0
3
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
5 months
Had a GCP sales rep try and sell me on the "Google brand" being worth the premium over @LambdaAPI . When did cloud providers move so far away from just trying to solve their customers' problems...
0
0
3
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
4 months
@ericjang11 I would pay a non-negligible amount of money to watch an MMA fight between Optimus and a Zuckerbot
0
0
3
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
3 years
"A few years ago, when very little had been heard of digital computers, it was possible to elicit much incredulity concerning them, if one mentioned their properties without describing their construction." (Turing, 1950)
0
0
3
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
19 days
*ridiculously low opex Meant capex here obviously, at volume they are higher opex. Opex argument comes later on
0
0
2
@benjamin_bolte
Benjamin Bolte
8 months
@ericjang11 GPU Robin Hood’s, stealing from the GPU rich to give to the GPU poor
0
0
0