Justyna Zander

Computation of Things

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Tesla says it's building its own maps for FSD.

"We are building an entirely new architecture with AI. It will learn your preferences and the fleet preferences." - @aelluswamy

[Nous Research @NousResearch]

Jensen closed his GTC Berlin 2026 keynote with this Hermes Agent demo as the finale.

He introduced it by saying the way to build an agent is to ask an agent to build it for you, so he installed and set up a customized Hermes in one prompt.

Then he used Hermes, running on @nvidia RTX Spark, to create a simulated training environment for the @huggingface Microduck. Hermes planned an obstacle course with Nemotron and had GPT-6 Astra build it using FreeCAD, Omniverse libraries, Blender, Newton, and Isaac Lab. Hermes trained thousands of simulated ducks on that course until the validated policy was ready to run on the real robot in the physical world.

At Nous, we believe open source is a practical tool as much as a philosophical ideal. It gives users the ability to build powerful, complex workflows chaining numerous local+cloud models, devices, and tools themselves instead of waiting for a company to enable them.

[First Squawk @FirstSquawk]

NVIDIA CEO JENSEN HUANG SAYS EVERYTHING WILL BE COMPLETELY SOFTWARE-DRIVEN AND AI-DRIVEN, AND EVERY COMPANY WILL BUILD BRAINS, INCLUDING THE BRAINS THAT GO INTO THE PRODUCTS THEY SHIP

[Min Choi @minchoi]

Wow... Grok Voice 3.0 just dropped

And it's now the #1 speech-to-speech model in the world.

Under 1 second to respond.

It's already live in Grok Bot voice mode, Teslas, and Starlink support.

This is the closest AI voice has felt to a real person 👇

[dnap @dnapway]

Jensen reveals he first met the Founder of TSMC by cold calling their number off Yellow Pages

"I heard about this company in Taiwan, TSMC and UMC at the time. They were of course quite poor companies themselves, and they were barely making it."

"TSMC was probably about $300 million, something like that. It's a tiny little company. I heard about Morris Chang. And so I tried to call their US office."

"Back in the old days there were yellow pages. I looked it up, TSMC. There's a number there. I called their number and it's a recording. I left my name and my number and said a few things about NVIDIA: we're a new startup company building computer graphics chips. I called several times. Nobody called me back."

"And so I finally wrote a letter to Morris Chang. Didn't hear anything for a long time, and then one day it was 6 o'clock or something, this person called and said 'this is Morris Chang from TSMC.'"

"And meanwhile, everybody outside my office was playing video games and they're all laughing and screaming. 'Hey shut up! It's Morris!' I was so happy that the founder would actually call us back, because hey, maybe we won't have to die."

"And so we talked and he invited me to Taiwan. I came back to Taiwan, and that was the start of everything. Not just that partnership, but just the whole industry."

[Lukas Ziegler @lukas_m_ziegler]

This is the capital of robotics! 🌁

Silicon Valley is home to so many physical AI companies that you could spend a month visiting them and still not see even 10% of them (trust me, I tried).

So, the Bay Area is the world's leading ecosystem for robotics startups, bringing together top AI talent, top universities, experienced founders, and unmatched access to capital.

The region is anchored by Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, two of the world's top universities for AI and robotics. They produce a constant stream of researchers, founders, and breakthrough technologies.

The Bay Area is also home to many of the companies shaping the future of robotics and AI, including @Figure_robot, @physical_int, @GeneralistAI, and major AI labs such as @OpenAI, or @GoogleDeepMind.

This concentration of talent makes it easy for startups to recruit experienced engineers and collaborate with leaders in embodied AI.

Not mentioning that it  is also home to leaders such as @NVIDIARobotics, whose headquarters and leadership in AI chips power much of today's robotics revolution, and Tesla, whose work on autonomous driving and humanoid robots has created a deep pool of robotics, AI, and manufacturing talent.

Perhaps its biggest advantage is access to capital, talent and ambition.

The Bay Area has the world's deepest network of venture capital firms, serial entrepreneurs, and technical leaders who are willing to fund bold, long-term robotics companies.

In the comments I'll post the companies from the ecosystem.

‼️ Note that Bay Area has >300 robotics companies, research labs, and innovation hubs, so this is a curated selection of the notable product companies, not an exhaustive census!

P.S. I'm constantly working on improving these maps, so if your company is missing, please DM me with basic info about the co, and I will include it in the next release.

P.S.2 I have last open slots for my December RoboTour in the Bay Area, if you want to create content together and show the world what are you cooking, dm! :)

~~ 

♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → https://t.co/GoA3ZuwoPB

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

This is what real software security thinking looks like. Not moral platitudes or meeting with religious leaders.

[Justyna Zander @ZanderJustyna]

"who's afraid of the little old me" 🔥

[Bowie @bowie_HQ]

Today, no one in right mind can deny the impact of Tesla & Elon.

@elonmusk @Tesla

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

BREAKING: Germany’s transport minister pushes for Tesla FSD approval across Europe.

Speaking today at a Tagesspiegel Background conference in Berlin, Steffen Bilger said:

• He will push for Tesla FSD Supervised to reach drivers across the EU soon.

• He sees potential for FSD to make roads safer and wants to support innovation.

• Germany should explore its own approval route if EU talks fail.

• He will work to ensure that this system can be used throughout Europe soon.

📸 Lena Ganssmann / Tagesspiegel

[Greg Hunkins @greghunkins]

Succession Doomer Themed
Ep. 1: You Are Not Serious People

[Rev Lebaredian @RevLebaredian]

Simulators are time machines. They let us explore possible futures before trying them in the physical world.

AI agents can now automate simulation development that required teams of specialists. We’ve crossed a threshold.

Now everyone can build time machines.

[Kevin Liu ᝮ @kevskgs]

September 1st, 2024.

I was a freshman at @Princeton, and @drfeifei was our Pre-read assembly speaker. The whole Class of 2028 was in Jadwin Gym, and she took questions from six microphone lines for over an hour.

One particularly memorable insight she gave was about hardware: "Anywhere there's a chip, there's computing. Anywhere there's computing, it'll be changed by AI."

Twelve days after that talk, @theworldlabs came out of stealth with $230 million.

Today, @AMD announced it's buying World Labs for $8.2 billion in stock, and she's joining as Chief Scientist reporting to @LisaSu.

25 months ago, she told a gym full of 18-year-olds that every chip would be changed by AI. Now she runs research at a chip company that paid $8.2 billion for hers.

She also told us some of us would become the developers of AI, some the users, and some the policy makers, and that our generation would have to decide what to do with it. I had been on campus for about a week. Two years later, I reside in SF at @generaltxn, spending most of my time building agents on top of these models.

Think about the timescale. She spent close to 20 years on computer vision before ImageNet mattered to anyone outside the research world, and she still started a new company from zero. But this time, the payoff took two years. We are on the steepest part of the exponential.

The most important thing she told us was to soak it in. I think she meant the four years of college, but the advice is true for this whole decade and century.

[NVIDIA Newsroom @nvidianewsroom]

Introducing the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform.

An open reference design built with partners that continuously monitors and governs agent behavior, ensuring that AI agents follow the rules.

Read the release: https://t.co/CBqYXnJSZy

[Justyna Zander @ZanderJustyna]

@IntCyberDigest Never doubt Jensen Huang, neither his knowledge nor his integrity. He is a living example of the kind of a person one aspires to become.

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Jensen Huang: don’t mistake engineering vocabulary for evidence of a machine mind. AI is still software, not a human mind inside a machine.

"We can't make jokes about all this stuff, we're scaring the American public."

Words like “spawn,” “parent,” “child,” and “kill” have existed in computing for decades; Giving those same mechanisms human characteristics today because of AI is unnecessary and misleading.

----
From "The Ezra Klein Show + New York Times Opinion + New York Times Podcasts" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)

[NVIDIA @nvidia]

AI is technology that is built and improved by people, who have a responsibility to develop and deploy it thoughtfully.

And helping people benefit from AI means taking its challenges seriously.

The technology industry needs to do that work.

[Nathan Lambert @natolambert]

The biggest disagreement JSD and I had in this podcast was on the impact of distillation. In our research for Interconnects, @xeophon and I agree that there's no hard evidence that distillation is a massive impact for the Chinese labs.

At the same time, the gossip mill in SF has been doubling down on the Chinese labs getting massive gains from distilltion.

The argument where distillation is a huge impact is something along the lines of distilled traces go into mid training and make RL work far more easily.

My argument, that distillation is a 1-2 month pull ahead in capabilities closer to the frontier, is that Chinese labs already have sufficiently strong models, where this mid-training setup can be done on their own models, and most of the capabilities gains are from scaling RL environment training, which doesn't link cleanly to the distillation data pathway. We feel like the recent RL dashboard from @XiaomiMiMo supports this claim.

A lot of it comes down to a gut call on if you can believe it that the Chinese labs are really great at building LLMs, maybe even better than focusing than OpenAI/Ant etc, as their current ambitions are a bit narrower (catching up), rather than transformative products/inventions

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Grok Bot has just officially launched in @Tesla vehicles.

I got early access a couple weeks ago. You can order stuff on online (such as Amazon), manage your email, calendar, finances, or other tasks through Grok @Bot using just your voice in your Tesla.

There is no separate app, everything just lives within the existing Grok Voice interface in your Tesla (as shown in my Model Y below).

One good use case for Grok Bot in your Tesla: You get in, tell Grok Bot to order coffee at a location of your choice, and while your Tesla drives you to the coffee shop using FSD (Supervised), Grok places the order so it’s ready when you arrive.

Grok Bot in Tesla vehicles is currently only available to SuperGrok Heavy users, but will expand to more owners later. Connectors are available to all users.

[Beth Kindig @Beth_Kindig]

By 2035, data centers in the US are projected to consume more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined, per BloombergNEF.

$NVDA $MSFT $GOOG $AMZN

[SMB Attorney @SMB_Attorney]

You need to stop and read this again…

Warren Buffet’s final words of advice from his very last annual letter 🥹

"One perhaps self-serving observation. I’m happy to say I feel better about the second half of my life than the first. My advice: Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes – learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve. Get the right heroes and copy them. You can start with Tom Murphy; he was the best.

Remember Alfred Nobel, later of Nobel Prize fame, who – reportedly – read his own obituary that was mistakenly printed when his brother died and a newspaper got mixed up. He was horrified at what he read and realized he should change his behavior.

Don’t count on a newsroom mix-up: Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it.

Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.

I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman."

And then today, his last letter to shareholders as chairman…