Urban Machine suspending lumber recycling operations in American Canyon due to a lack of demand

July 2025

July 2025
A conversation with Ben Bolte — AI & Robotics Engineer, formerly K-Scale Labs, now at OpenAI About the Speaker Ben Bolte is a roboticist and AI engineer who recently joined OpenAI. He previously founded and led K-Scale Labs, building open-source general-purpose humanoid robots for embodied intelligence. Before that, he worked at
Takeaways from Quanting Xie's presentation at CMU's Lab to Market, San Francisco — February 11, 2026 Increase a gear ratio by 100x and the reflected inertia increases by 10,000x. That single physics problem explains one of the biggest disconnects in robotics right now: we can build
A quiet but powerful consensus is building among robotics founders who are deploying real systems at scale: the hardware that powers today's most advanced robots is not the hardware that will power the robot revolution. While general-purpose AI accelerators from giants like NVIDIA have been instrumental in getting
Executive Summary: The development of general-purpose robots has converged on a critical, near-term strategy: leveraging human-operated teleoperation to generate the vast datasets required for training embodied AI foundation models. While effective, this approach has created a strategic schism in the market. This briefing provides a framework for analyzing the divergent