[codekansas]

Actually, we use COTS components for basically everything, that's how the price is so low. It's just that we do a lot to make sure we understand how everything works together from software to hardware

IMO humanoid companies do make a lot of big claims which is why it's important to make everything open-source. Don't have to take my word for it, can just read the code

[canvascritic]

Thanks for the reply

IME the COTS angle cuts both ways. It brings costs down and makes iteration faster, but whats the moat then?

if the value is in integration, that’s fine, but integration is fairly fragile IP. Open source is good reputationally but accelerates the diffusion of your edge unless the play is towards community+ecosystem lock-in or being the canonical reference impl (cf. ROS, HuggingFace)?

[codekansas]

Well, the point of being open-source is that I don't think there is much of a moat in the hardware, in the limit, and it's better to accelerate the ecosystem and start building standards. It's very similar to Tesla - electric cars are easier to build than gas cars, so the moat has to come from branding / integration / software (for reference, before K-Scale I worked on the FSD ML team at Tesla, which informed a lot of my thinking about what the right business model for this would look like).

I think humanoids are in their infancy. Eventually most of the margin will come from software capabilities, which we do plan to charge a lot of money for (like, download a software package and your robot can clean your house, that's probably worth something). But in order for that business model to work we need to have commodity, standardized hardware.

[canvascritic]

this all makes sense and is honestly the most coherent humanoid startup thesis i've seen outside of figure.ai. You're right that the unit economics of hardware are a trap unless you can commoditize the complements. And humanoid hardware clearly wants to become a commodity, but no one's finished the job yet and it seems brutally difficult (see: the ghost of Willow Garage)

The tesla analogy makes sense to me but with a caveat: they still spend billions on CapEx and own verticals like battery chemistry and drivetrain design. In this case you’re betting that the value collapses upward into software, like the shift from phones to apps, but for that to work, your software has to deliver exponential delta per dollar

With that I think the real risk is that your "clean your house" package is deceptively hard in the long tail, and you will end up with the iRobot Roomba UX. Novelty fades fast when it constantly gets stuck under the couch or whatever the equivalent of that is for humanoids. To be fair iRobot/Roomba is a household name but still "only" a ~$1.5B company, which seems meager compared to ambitions in this space

As an aside I would love to see an RFC-style doc on how you think humanoid software standards should emerge. ROS is still a frankenstein, and someone needs to kill it gently lol

[yorwba]

The dangerous failure mode for humanoid robots is that they get off-balance and the usual compensation mechanism fails, so now you have a heavy chunk of metal slamming down. You don't want to be at the bottom of a flight of stairs that a robot is walking on.

[rubitxxx5]

I disagree.

If I made ~15M USD/yr and was much younger, I’d strongly consider buying this, specifically because it seems wide open. Others will just buy it and won’t think about the cost, but they’ll probably consider the community. You can’t have community for something like this unless it’s open. If it’s open you’ll get early adopters which can help develop the community.

You must focus on making it better and cultivating a community first.

[alihkw_]

You do not need 15M USD/year to buy our robots. With 15M USD you could get ~1666 Kbots, or ~15,015 Zbots.

For reference, for the current Kbot to be 10% of your annual income, you would need to make $90,000 a year. And we plan to drive the cost down much much lower for the hardware.

[poopiokaka]

I don’t think the original comment was about spending the entire $15M on your robots