The automated life | San Francisco/Silicon Valley AI, robotics, BCIs | Ex-Microsoft, Rackspace, Fast Company | Wrote eight books about the future.
San Jose, California, USA
Joined November 2006
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New problem: AI can make almost anyone look like an expert.
This week, @IrenaCronin and I discuss how deeper experience matters when using AI.
As polished work becomes cheap, the real advantage shifts to judgment, experience, taste, and knowing when AI is wrong.
Read and subscribe for free: unaligned.io (a new one comes every week).
I told you this months ago. I saw a researcher do exactly this.
Your systems and mine will be attacked.
So you better spend the tokens to do a security audit at minimum and fix any holes it finds.
“as agents start spending money for us, every approval should show the price, not just ask permission.”
Gul says @NousResearch’ Hermes is one of the first to do that.
Hermes Agent makes 3D models from text. But the real news is bigger than that.
An AI agent that makes 3D models from text? Not new.
Meshy, a text-to-3D tool, has an MCP server (a standard way to plug tools into AI agents).
Any agent that supports MCP, including Claude and Codex, can already connect to it.
Agents asking permission before acting?
Also not new.
Claude Code and Codex do that all the time.
So what did Nous Research actually add with the new Meshy plugin for Hermes Agent?
The new part is the price check.
A normal approval asks: "Allow this tool?"
Hermes asks: "This costs 15 credits. Go ahead?"
In the demo, someone asks for a boss enemy for their Godot game. Hermes picks the settings (15,000 triangles, 4K textures, a GLB file for Godot), tells them the cost, and only spends after they say yes.
That's a small change, but an important one.
Agents are starting to spend real money: credits, API calls, cloud resources.
Permission alone isn't enough. You need to know what it costs before you click yes.
Nous also added polish on top:
→ One-line install from the official plugin catalog
→ Models render in the chat, and rigged characters animate there
→ A gallery of every model and prompt you've made
→ Short preview videos on messaging apps, so you can create from your phone
→ 3D-print prep: fixing problems, splitting into parts, handing off to a slicer
The catch: you need a Meshy Pro plan and API key, and every model costs credits.
What I find interesting as someone building agent tools:
as agents start spending money for us, every approval should show the price, not just ask permission.
Hermes is one of the first to make that the default.
Links in the reply 👇
Robert Scoble retweeted
Everyone who's spending money on tokens is going to spend money on APIs for their agents.
This is the next OpenRouter.
Thanks Robert for coming by!!
Bleeding edge San Francisco AI startup: @MonidHQ
Makes an automatic AI router to get your AI agents access to better models for what you are asking it to do.
@shengkunye tells me why his is the best at his office at @fdotinc.
One of San Francisco’s best startup factories.
It seems to me that AI-based video games are like AI video generators were a few years ago.
A new culture and industry was born there and this is giving me the same vibes.
Bleeding edge San Francisco AI startup: @MonidHQ
Makes an automatic AI router to get your AI agents access to better models for what you are asking it to do.
@shengkunye tells me why his is the best at his office at @fdotinc.
One of San Francisco’s best startup factories.
Culture is the moat.
Who has the most diverse factory in the world?
Talked to a robotics entrepreneur today who explained this process to me while standing out front of the Physical AI event at Fort Mason. Stealth Mode. Building a robot brain that uses reinforcement learning. In both simulator and in real world.
Think about humanoid putting away forks in our kitchens.
You put your forks in a different place than I do.
So maybe the robot opens a cabinet and three drawers before it finds the correct place, he told me. Each try is a failure. Success gets reinforced.
But this will do “perfect” Chinese food.
I once was at the Pearl Hotel in Shanghai. There was a jazz band there that copied American jazz perfectly but it had no soul.
So what if a worker who grew up on China wears the data collection system home and record his grandma cooking food.
And another worker, the same night, was recording his German grandma. And another one recording her Korean grandma. And another her Peruvian grandma. And another his Iranian grandma.
I had the Iranian one living with us for years.
She made the best I have ever had and I have been to the best in Los Angeles and I love my wife’s cooking. And she just entertained 20 on Saturday and everyone loved it.
Soul. Culture.
The robot can’t learn that online. Elon has so many advantages.
But the first one won’t do all that. Is gonna work in the factory.
I predict that in three years Elon announces a consumer one that is lighter, cheaper, more dexterous, for our homes.
But the factory robot will show signs of this “soul.”
Elon called his AI sentient the other day and a lot of people gave him shit about that.
If Elon figures out how to capture grandma then your robot will have soul and be able to do everything.
One last point. A lot of my neighbors have machine shops in their garages.
I built a Thisle sailboat with my neighbor in his garage. Other neighbors do all sorts of different projects in theirs.
A machine shop edition would be a huge seller.
Here diversity, too, matters. In San Jose on Saturday nights there are a club that show off the low rider cars they built.
They have different technologies in their garage than the robot company has in theirs that I met today. And that is different than the guy down the street who tears apart Ford Sprinter vans.
Optimus could help everyone build things. Finish projects that we have been spending years on. Rebuilding an old Harley kind of thing.
This morning another Chinese robot company has a video of it jumping over a car and lifting it up.
Cute.
But what will get me to buy one is what it could do for me in the garage.
Set your RL to learn that!
Takes a certain culture to get what I am saying.
Can I get an “amen” from the builders?
How do you teach a humanoid robot to walk without programming every move?
Reinforcement learning step by step
1. Build a simulation (MuJoCo or NVIDIA Isaac Lab) with joints motors sensors and a physics model.
2. Define the task: walk forward while keeping balance.
3. Write a reward function points for moving toward the target staying upright and matching the desired speed. Penalties for falls, wasted energy and unstable movements.
4. A neural network, the policy, reads the robot's state (joint positions, joint velocities, body orientation) and outputs target positions or torques for each joint.
5. An algorithm like PPO updates the policy over many episodes and millions of simulated time steps.
6. Close the sim-to-real gap with domain randomization, then test carefully in the real world.
Do you understand a single word that Todd says?
You probably live in San Francisco.
:-)
At @DaywardAI we've been operating in stealth mode for the last six months on a world-changing project, and now it's finally ready to be introduced. I'm incredibly please to introduce the Agentabulator. AI will never be the same.
It's hard to explain in words, it's best that you watch our launch video below.
Robert Scoble retweeted
At @DaywardAI we've been operating in stealth mode for the last six months on a world-changing project, and now it's finally ready to be introduced. I'm incredibly please to introduce the Agentabulator. AI will never be the same.
It's hard to explain in words, it's best that you watch our launch video below.
Robert Scoble retweeted
What to do when your cloud provider is breached, from a former cyber insurance adjuster:
If your provider just disclosed a breach, you have to assume you've been exposed.
And every instinct you have about what to do next is probably wrong. So here's what you should actually do:
When you first hear about the hack, even if you doubt you were exposed, you need to get on it. Right away.
I don't care if you're on a date, or at your son's college graduation.
Get to a computer and start rotating every secret…everything. When someone asks later how fast you responded, you want the answer to be "immediately," with timestamps to prove it.
You're going to want to put as little in writing as possible. I get the instinct.
Do the opposite.
Document everything, obsessively. If your provider has locked things down and you can't rotate something yet, write that down too, with the time you tried. If you're using agents to investigate (and you should be, spread wide across everything), keep every trace and make them write down everything they find.
This will feel wrong in your soul. Do it anyway. If this ever turns into a claim, if you can show you did everything you were supposed to, minute by minute, you will survive.
You might tell yourself it's just names and emails and nobody cares. But this is wrong. All customer data counts.
I've watched companies lose millions just because someone could see data they shouldn't have.
You're going to want to wait for your provider to finish investigating before communicating with your own customers. Don't.
Figure out what information may have been exposed, even if you’re not sure yet who it belongs to, and what obligations you have under your contracts / applicable law. Your cloud provider’s investigation doesn’t change the fact that you have your own obligations to meet. And learning about a deadline after you’ve missed it is a very expensive lesson.
Bookmark this. I hope you never need it, but with everything happening lately, there's a real chance you will.
Robert Scoble retweeted
defining a new category: phone-use
an mcp/api that gives ai agents their own phones
cloud phones. real androids. real iphones.
tell your agent what to do, and it can operate a phone just like you do.
today, ai agents face three fundamental problems and phoneuse solves them 🧵
What a mess.
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Robert Scoble retweeted
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.
Robert Scoble retweeted
People who cured / are curing their own cancer on X:
1/ @sytses - bone cancer, billionaire founder of Gitlab, developed 10+ personalized therapies for himself.
2/ @paul_conyngham - shrank his dog Rosie's mast cell cancer tumors after chemo and surgery weren't enough. Now backed by YC and Founders Fund
3/ @miriamgonp - stage 4 breast cancer, tumor sequenced, searching for vaccine manufacturer now
4/ @kevinace - stage 4 lung cancer, angel investor in 300+ companies, first drug stopped working after 18 months. Vaccine designed, now paying $300k out of pocket for the vaccine
5/ @masonbgrant: going founder mode on his his 32-year-old wife's rare liver cancer, sequencing her tumor with AI agents
6/ @ArunRLverma: former product leader at Atoms and Shopify, brain tumor, built a vaccine from his tumor. Now building an AI health agent startup based on what he went through
We're going to make it
Robert Scoble retweeted
1/ Today we're introducing Breken, and with it the final job in software: production engineering.
Your tests check what your team thought of. Production checks everything else. Today, your users run that second test for you.
Breken runs it instead. Your real software, in worlds that behave like production, down to the chaos and the users, finding and fixing what breaks before a single user does.
Here it is: breken.ai
Robert Scoble retweeted
For the first time ever, someone cleaned their home using only their mind
Thank you @DeadManRolln and @neuralink for making this possible 🙏
My wife and I first video edit ever lol
@maticrobots breaking vacuum history being the first robot vacuum in the world to be controlled, purely with thoughts!
I am so stoked and honored they allowed me the chance to try this out!