Build a robot -> Get a YC Interview
Introducing RoboHacks, hosted at Y Combinator by Innate and Iterate.
36h
25 Robots
120 builders
15k in prizes
Thank you to our partners: NASA (@ilopezfr), @scale_AI, DeepMind, ElevenLabs, Nebius and Dryft. https://t.co/zDdc1zJtxL
We brought robots to @ycombinator
1100+ applications around the world
12% acceptance rate
24 Innate robots
For 36 hours straight, 120 hackers built physical agents in the most famous office in the bay.
You can check out all the projects on https://t.co/HnWxqXXr7a
I won an RTX 5090 GPU at Mistral AI worldwide hackathon in Paris, and I have absolutely no idea on how to use it.
Here's what I actually built: an image generation model fine-tuned to do technical analysis on trading charts. I trained it on an NVIDIA cloud GPU then back-tested it against Binance historical data.
The model was profitable.
The jury didn't quite catch the vibe. But apparently someone did because two weeks later, they reached out to tell me I'd won the NVIDIA track.
Today, a €4,000 RTX Founders Edition showed up at my door. Absolutely gorgeous piece of hardware.
One small problem: I use a MacBook. So if anyone has creative suggestions for what to do with a top-tier GPU and no desktop to put it in… I'm listening
Huge thanks to NVIDIA, Mistral AI and Iterate team for appreciating my weird idea and an attempt to push tech to its boundaries
We won the Grand Prize and Best use of Data Prize at robohacks, @ycombinator and @innate_bot
In ~27 hours, we built a zero-shot spatial memory layer that lets a robot understand a new environment from a single video walkthrough.
presented at the @ycombinator office!
at RoboHacks, we built Recon, an autonomous explosive-defusal robot that detects humans through walls (2nd overall).
totally worth the two all-nighters.
built with @OfficialNathanY@pathofseb, Paavan Gupta, Ethan Lai, Daniel Wang
What a weekend at @ycombinator for the robotics hackathon. You could feel the field becoming more concrete in real time.
Glad to be on judging panel from @nebiusai
& amazing to see teams building on Nebius through the weekend, plus fun to see the UFB powered by Nebius
“Can you make a robot actually do something useful”
❗️Saturday 11 April
👉 9:00 - 17:00 GMT-7
📍 San Francisco, California
Registrations here:
https://t.co/cQagedveVM
@innate_bot, @GoogleDeepMind, @NASA, @ycombinator
dream weekend at robohacks by @innate_bot at the @ycombinator office.
my first exposure to hardware was so fun! we got a special mention for the @GoogleDeepMind track. will drop details of the project below
team rm -rf \legs 🐐
The second team blew me away because it shows that a robot that might not have good enough hands to do something specific can:
1. Recognize that with an AI agent
2. Build its own tool
3. 3D print the tool to grab a new object or do something new
4. Grab that tool out of the 3D printer and use it to manipulate the world in a new way
This all happens automatically, and it just shows that there is so much of a future in robotics that we haven't even thought about. It really blew my mind.
Just a little taste of the Robohacks hackathon happening now at @ycombinator in San Francisco.
This is only two of the teams.
The first is a team building a robot for an AirBnb on Mars.
The second built a system that 3D prints new tools for the robot to do new work on Mars.
Both demonstrate why I love builders so much.
Dreaming of a new world and learning together how to build for a new robot none of them have used before.
Met Wall-E today at the @ycombinator hackathon sponsored by @GoogleDeepMind
We got more than 1000 registrants for the event! Super cool seeing everyone here :)