How Auki Thinks About Decentralized VPS, and What’s Coming Next

A Call With Bradley: What Actually Makes Auki Different

The week started with a call with Bradley, the community member making excellent videos about our work. He’s preparing for a major podcast appearance and wanted a crisp explanation of how Auki differs from the big Web2 and Web3 spatial computing players.

That conversation led to a clear recap worth sharing:

Centralized vs. Decentralized Data Collection

• Centralized data collection: Google drives Street View cars and builds Google Spatial API from billions of images.
• Decentralized data collection: Niantic gathers spatial data through Pokémon Go players. Some Web3 projects like OVR/MeshMap pay users in tokens to map things.

But—whether the data is centralized or crowdsourced—all of them run centralized VPS services. Even if the data comes from users, it still ends up in their VPS, controlled by their servers.

“Even with decentralized data collection, you still have the privacy concerns that come with a centralized VPS.”

What a Decentralized VPS Actually Looks Like

Centralizing the VPS on Filecoin or similar isn’t practical due to latency. Instead, we build what we call a polycentrically decentralized service: Every individual venue can self-host the solution and be their own centralized micro-service. We are a discovery service that points to them.

This gives:

1. Market-driven data valueAs Nils puts it, “We don’t know enough about the world to know what data is valuable. Let the market decide.” Venues pay to map themselves—no need for us to guess which data is worth buying.‍
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2. Privacy for commercial spaces
   Private venues will never let Google or Niantic own their spatial data. They’re happy to run their own hyperlocal VPS instance.‍
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3. Performance
   AR glasses and robots need extremely low latency. Hyperlocal compute wins.

This trio—performance, privacy, and market-determined data value—is what sets our network apart. Even most “decentralized” competitors are still centralized VPSs at heart.

Malaysia: Terri Meets the Prime Minister

The Malaysian situation is fully resolved, and Terri is flying out next Sunday for an event in Kuala Lumpur where he’ll meet the Prime Minister. (Yes, Terri now speaks with a Malaysian accent.)

We’ll also be deploying app-free AR navigation at the event.

Shipping the New Cactus Release

We skipped our usual internal demo day to finish the latest release of Cactus, our spatial AI for retail—and it went out the door today.

Highlights:

• Major performance improvements for stores with tens of thousands of products
• Optimized APIs so phones don’t lag or overheat
• UI improvements
• And the big one: the foundations for a spatial AI data scientist

We’ve transitioned away from our older patented technique for capturing product positions to a new, richer data capture method.

“We want an AI data scientist giving tasks to staff or robots on how to optimize the store.”

This prepares Cactus for a future where autonomous experimentation and layout optimization become standard.

China’s Robotics Boom: Notes From Shanghai

A recap from last week’s World AI Conference in Shanghai:

• Around 30 humanoid robots were on display.
• Robotics companies in China barely bother selling abroad because “the sales cycle is days to weeks in China, but months to years in the West.”
• Many have no English-speaking staff and no English sales material—they don’t need it.
• Deals close so fast domestically that exporting is basically an afterthought.

“If you don’t speak Mandarin, you are behind.” It’s a stark reminder of how quickly robotics is accelerating in Asia compared to Western markets.

Heading to Los Angeles on September 9

A VC (not even one of our investors) invited us to LA on September 9 to present Auki to a gathering of the world’s top retailers.

“We’re going to demo to some of the world’s largest retailers all in one day.”

If you're in LA and want to meet up, let us know.

App-Free Navigation Continues to Roll Out

We’ll be showing app-free AR navigation—built in partnership with Zappar—at the Malaysia event, and it remains one of the most requested features from partners.

Wrapping Up

To recap the speaker’s on-stream summary:

• Terri is meeting the Malaysian Prime Minister next week
• We’re traveling to LA on September 9 to pitch major retailers
• A new release of Cactus is out, laying groundwork for spatial AI data scientists

If you watch these updates on X: the real alpha happens after the livestream ends, exclusively inside our Discord at discord.gg/aukiverse.

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Watch the whole update on X.

About Auki

Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building the real world web: a way for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations.

70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the physical world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100bn devices on Earth and beyond.

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