Mike Slagh

Work on hardcore things with hardcore people

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

Follow this account if you care about military service

[ASN Ben Kohlmann @NavyASNMRA]

Good morning. America is worth defending!

[ASN Ben Kohlmann @NavyASNMRA]

Good morning America is worth defending

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

Be on the lookout (like a formal BOLO) for anything that, even when you squint, has a chance of helping turn the tide and getting Americans to love AI. You have to talk to a lot of Americans outside your bubble to know what I’m talking about.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Intelligence Factory is building human intelligence for robots.

They train general-purpose manipulation models on human demonstration data (vision, action, and touch), then deploy them in warehouses, grocery stores, and data centers.

Congrats on the launch, @coldifl and Jalaj!

https://t.co/fj1UJtiZxx

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

@JasonrShuman we are still so, so early

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

You love to see the hardcode builders who help everyone else out and rise the tide really win!

[Zane Mountcastle @zanemountcastle]

1/ I'm excited to announce that @Picogrid closed a $45M Series A, led by @BessemerVP.

We're building the open infrastructure layer for the military's growing arsenal of sensors, drones, autonomous systems, AI agents, and C2 software.

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

So true, @dodgeblake

(it is probably our fault)

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

Lock in

[Department of War CTO @DoWCTO]

Our ancestors built this country from nothing.

Their legacy is worth protecting. 🇺🇸

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

@eventidia Yep true

[Ryan @eventidia]

This is legitimately very impressive

Across the federal government, there are varying degrees of delay between a new model release and the government being able to use it; I’ve heard of some agencies being forced to use AI from a year ago

Anybody that actually uses AI regularly knows how big of a difference there is between current and past models

Really cool to see the DOW (of all places) speed up adoption

A government-excluded jagged takeoff would suck

[Austen Allred @Austen]

“The AI exec. order was postponed because David Sacks called Trump this morning and argued that having the federal government review models before their public release would slow down innovation.”

Obviously true.

Thank you David Sacks.

[Saman Farid @samanfarid]

Lightwheel reported $100M in Q1 orders for robotics simulation and deployment infrastructure. Not the robot itself. The pipes that make the robot work at scale. The demand for real-world data has never been greater.

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

@samanfarid Yes.

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

@DrJimFan 😮‍💨

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

"Born just in time to solve robotics"

[Jim Fan @DrJimFan]

I promise this will be the best 20 min you spend today! Robotics: Endgame, the sequel to my last year's Sequoia AI Ascent talk, "Physical Turing Test". I laid out the roadmap for solving Physical AGI as a simple parallel to the LLM success story. Be a good scientist, copy homework ;)

And stay till the end, more easter eggs and predictions for your polymarket!

00:30 DGX-1 origin story at OpenAI, I was there in 2016 signing with Jensen and Elon. Heading to the Computer History Museum!
01:42 The Great Parallel
03:31 Robotics, the Endgame
03:39 Why VLAs fall short
04:32 Video world models as the 2nd pretraining paradigm
06:09 World Action Models (WAM)
07:46 Strategies for robot data collection and the FSD equivalent to physical data flywheel for robot manipulation
11:06 EgoScale and the Dexterity Scaling Law we discovered recently
14:00 Physical RL: bridging the last mile
15:39 DreamDojo: an end-to-end neural physics engine for scaling RL in silico
17:00 Civilizational Technology Tree and my predictions for the near future. Spoiler: it's closer than you think.

Thanks to my friends at Sequoia for inviting me back to AI Ascent this year! I had a blast! Last year's talk is attached in the thread if you missed it.

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

Have been thinking a lot about this lately. It would result in AI that people actually loved.

[stash @stash_pomichter]

Deploy hardware / robots. The last mecca of defensible value creation.

Best of both. Accelerated 100x with AI but sticky physical human component: real-world testing, QA, networking, teleop.

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

@JoshuaSteinman We are so early

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

There is infinite demand for deals like this. If you think this is you and you’re willing to go all the way, you’re probably right.

[TBPN @tbpn]

SendCutSend founder @jimbelosic just raised $110M from @patrickc and @collision, @andrew__reed, and @matthuang to do "the Amazon of manufacturing."

The idea for the deal started after he got introduced to Patrick on 𝕏.

"He was like, 'Oh yeah, I've heard about your company. You guys sound awesome. I'll invest.'"

"I was like, 'That sounds amazing. Thank you. How does this work? I don't know how investment works.'"

"It became this dream team, and I was like, 'If I don't do it now, I don't know if I'll ever be able to put this together again.'"

Jim tells the story:

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

@joshu It’s delicious :)

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

You have to choose sides.

[TBPN @tbpn]

John: There is a lot of opposition to building in America, broadly. That's just the nature of our society.

I was thinking about, what do Americans want to build? Because it's easy to look at the data center stuff and be like, "Well, everyone's against building data centers."

I was reflecting on the whole reindustrialization meme this weekend. And I was thinking about the actual knock-on effects of reindustrialization — most people don't want a car factory in their town.

I actually think people don't really want change. They don't want things built.

Data centers are probably at the bottom of the list. They're the least popular.

But people don't want stuff built, generally. There are very few things that people are like, "Yeah, I'd be down for that to be built." People like the status quo. They're happy with things as they are. And they don't like change.

People block home construction all the time. Also, permitting and expansion of existing homes.

I'm not saying that they're as unpopular as data centers. Data centers are at the bottom. But new housing in communities is like razor's edge.

I do think there's an element of like, Americans don't want to build anything.

[Mike Slagh @MikeSlagh]

@davidu @oyhsu Tampa office??? 🇺🇸