Duarte Monteiro

doing what i love

[Alexander A. Wolf @alexanderawolf]

Bringing a new computing approach from research to hardware that developers can use usually takes years, sometimes more than a decade. Sometimes it never makes it to market.

But we did it in about a year.

Today, with a team of three and the support of @fdotinc, we've shipped our first few dev kits with 10,000 synthetic neurons each, running computation based on oscillations and neural dynamics directly on hardware (paper out tomorrow).

Not an algorithm running on a CPU. Not a GPU. Synthetic neurons on hardware!

We believe in creating an open ecosystem and making the technology accessible to anyone who wants to experiment with synthetic neurons and build the foundations of biomimetic intelligence.

Together, we can create a community that moves away from the belief that brute-forcing data and scaling computing will solve robotics. We can create a community that takes the opposite approach and follows the cheat code nature handed to us.

A few years from now, I'm sure we'll look back and laugh at the approaches we took to build intelligent robots.

Seven dev kits sold last week to true pioneers, and counting. We're just getting started.

In the photo: our first dev kit, Prima-Lux, with a capacity for up to 10,000 synthetic neurons is delivered and sits where it belongs! Thank you deeply @FurqanR , our first believer!

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

The future is now old man

@Apheth_DAlmeida and @Linyan_Fu are killing it with their iteration speed

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

VLAs are an insult to engineers

They are a low effort/low creativity solution to robotics

It becomes even more apparent with the release of fable 5.2

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

@Sampaio_1605 AI SLOP 📣
🫂

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

Making robots feel

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

There's research to be done on non bitter lesson (yet) intelligence.

There's something after the transformer and we are building it.

[Richard Sutton @RichardSSutton]

Brute force computation is not enough for intelligence. Clever new methods are needed. The science of AI is far from finished. IMHO

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

@Apheth_DAlmeida @RobStride_com @Linyan_Fu @fdotinc @ycombinator People want it!

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

@amypretzel Yes, details?

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

@priymrj I still have the one you gave me 🤝

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

@kylecompute ❌

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

@M_Surazhsky That's the problem, it's high time for a new paradigm

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

Robotics looks like a fashion show switching up trends at a moments notice

But they are even shorter lived here

We started with VLAs
Moved on to World Models
With the release of Astra we have moved on to "agentic robotics" (whatever that means) in a matter of months

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

@alexanderawolf This is how the future of robotics looks like

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

@rianvilares 🧗🏼‍♂️

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

If you gave me a robot with supra human inteligence (please do), I'd tell you that's not even half the path.

Bottlenecks in 6 months will be:
- convincing factory owners
- robotics economy of scale
- finding the right revenue structure (not everything will be RaaS)

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

@fdotinc 🦿🦿

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

The best time to enter an industry is when consensus is low

That's robotics rn

Everyone has a slightly different opinion and there are not a lot of hard facts around

Start working on atoms instead of bits!

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

@joaopanizzutti If you go far back enough, the root of llms are neural networks, aka neurons
Also, look up the inspiration for winglets

There's a balance to be had

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

What's the only example in nature of the physical intelligence we are in search of?

It's intuitive that robots have to be made to the image of humans!

[Duarte Monteiro @Duart_Monteiro]

Move atoms not bits

s̶o̶f̶t̶w̶a̶r̶e̶ hardware is eating the world