New Allies, New Nodes, New Nerves

Collaborating With Intel on the Real World Web

Last week we laid out the big picture:

• New internet for embodied AI (the real world web)
• New app store for the physical world
• New OS for embodied AI

This week was more concrete: we’ve started collaborating with Intel.

We’ve been talking with senior Intel architects about:

• Edge vs cloud for robots and embodied AI
• How compute should be distributed in a real world web, where venues host their own spatial data and robots/glasses connect to local nodes

We’re still under NDA, but the short version: Intel wants a seat at the table as this new stack forms, and they see our network as part of that future. We’re looking forward to continuing the work together in the US.

Builders Level Up: Reconstruction Node in the Wild

Last week we open-sourced the reconstruction server. This week we saw the first serious external usage:

• A veteran spatial-computing engineer shipped a native Mac version of the reconstruction server
• He also built his own alternative to our DMT (Domain Management Tool) app – we’d talked about this theoretically, he just went ahead and did it

We’re also:

• Preparing a substantial grant for a long-time community member who’s turning his AI copilot prototypes into a proper company
• Supporting him not just with tokens, but with engineering help and resources

The snowball is rolling: people have gone beyond just using our tools to founding companies on the network and extending the infrastructure itself.

Meet Rich Robinson, Chairman of Intercognitive

We also introduced Rich Robinson, the first chairman of Intercognitive, our industry work group for making the physical world accessible to AI.

Rich in a nutshell:

• 25 years in China; now in Bali
• Serial founder (8 startups), investor/advisor in ~100 companies, mentor to hundreds more
• Entrepreneur-in-residence at Animoca Brands
• Professor of entrepreneurship at Peking University

He’s been deeply red-pilled on robots + DePIN: “I believe this is going to be the biggest industry in the history of civilization.”

Intercognitive’s role:

• Bring together projects like us, GeoNet, Tashi and others
• Create open, interoperable standards for physical AI
• Help move beyond “US vs China” into civilization-scale infrastructure that everyone can build on

Upcoming chances to see Rich:

• WOW Summit, Hong Kong – keynote on Sept 10
• Token 2049, Singapore – Intercognitive VIP event in a Sentosa villa on Oct 2

He’s also running a Geodnet station on his roof in Bali and is very vocal about DePIN as “a software upgrade to capitalism”: using networks and tokens to allocate infrastructure more efficiently and fairly.

Reconstruction Node Beta Rollout

On top of the open-sourcing, we’re now:

• Rolling out the reconstruction node to a small first wave of community operators (strong GPUs, e.g. 3060 Ti+)
• Updating the DMT iOS app so anyone can soon:
  1. Capture a venue with short scans
  2. Send those to the network
  3. Get back a 3D model reconstructed by community GPUs

This is the same pipeline we use for our grocery-store deployments; now it’s escaping the lab. More node operators will be added in phases, and builders can already explore the code on GitHub.

US Retail Pilot: From App to Core Infrastructure

Finally, an update on the US retail side:

• We’ve agreed terms for a paid pilot with a multi-billion-dollar US retailer (2,000+ locations)
• This is particularly satisfying given current cost-cutting and tariff anxiety; they still carved out budget for us
• Another cool thing: our existing client is already using Auki-generated spatial data as a foundation for other systems they’ve had for years

“We are becoming the foundation for things that they are doing… re-engineering their data pipelines to put us at the very center.”

That’s exactly where we want to sit in large organizations: as the spatial nervous system everything else plugs into.

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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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