Crypto 🅰️lpha Queen 👸

Last week I experimented with GPT-6 Astra controlling my robot arm. The results were pretty incredible and reinforced a thesis I've been developing about the future of AI robotics. Instead of giving an AI direct control of the robot's motors, I gave Astra a set of basic capabilities: - A RealSense depth camera to observe its environment - Linear movements within a bounded workspace - A gripper with a fixed downward orientation From there, I had Astra write its own robotics software, using YOLO for object detection and OpenCV for localization. The result? I can now give the robot a prompt like "arrange these blocks in a 2×2 grid," and it can identify their positions, plan the movements, and execute the task. Here's what I think is interesting: We're seeing increasingly capable multimodal LLMs that can reason about physical environments and write the code to interact with them. Rather than relying exclusively on end-to-end "physical intelligence" models to directly control robot joints, we can use coding agents to generate deterministic robot programs that can be inspected, tested, and validated before execution. There are still limitations. Astra's coding and reasoning can be slow, sometimes taking 5-10 minutes to implement a new capability. But once that code works, the robot can execute it repeatedly without waiting for the model to regenerate it. And modular software architectures are already helping reduce that iteration time too. I believe this approach could be one of the fastest paths to bringing AI into real industrial robotics. Imagine a factory where an operator describes what needs to be automated, and an AI agent observes the environment, writes the robot program, and iterates until the task works. We're not there yet. But the building blocks are coming together.

I'm more convinced than ever the Midwest is the best place to build a robotics startup - Deep manufacturing talent - Lower land & development costs - Dense high-value manufacturing network SF is giving us infinite intelligence Now we use it to reindustrialize the American core