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Checking in from San Francisco, Nils shared a packed update covering massive retail partnerships, our growing influence in the smart glasses sector, and a technical breakthrough that allows us to render massive 3D environments instantly.
Here is a look at our expanding global footprint and how the community is about to get heavily involved in training physical AI.
Later this month, Nils is heading to Europe for EuroShop, the world's largest retail trade show. We received a highly generous invitation to co-exhibit with one of the most respected physical fixture and shelving manufacturers in the retail industry.
The problem they face is one we understand well: staff turnover in retail is so high that new employees rarely know how to utilize advanced physical shelving features (like back-loading hinges or heavy-duty rollers). They want to use Cactus to break down spatial tasks and provide context-aware guidance for new employees, ensuring their retail customers get full utilization out of their hardware.
This partnership drops us directly in front of the world's largest retailers. It validates our core thesis that perception and cognitive labor are the immediate bottlenecks in physical work.
As Nils noted: "It is a flex that we are getting as much money for the companion app on the phone as other people are getting for their whole ass robot."
Our networking in Silicon Valley continues to yield incredible results. We started the week meeting with the World AI Eyewear Alliance—an organization formed by the biggest smart glasses OEMs to drive industry standards.
Alongside Caden, CEO of Mentra, we presented our vision for spatial computing. The reception was overwhelmingly positive, and it is highly likely that Auki will officially join the Alliance to help shape the future of smart glasses.
Meanwhile, the robotics community in the US is starting to fully grasp the pragmatic reality of our go-to-market strategy. "A joke we kept hearing last week was that Auki is the only robotics company with an actual business plan."
In the Hong Kong lab, the team has achieved a major technical milestone in how we render massive Gaussian splat reconstructions.
We have successfully separated the 3D data into different Levels of Detail (LOD)—a low-detail "smudgy" layer for immediate spatial context, and a high-detail layer for fine-grained crispness. Because these load separately, we can instantly render entire supermarkets in real-time in a browser without caching.
This is crucial for closing the deployment gap with robots. If a robot throws an error in the back of a store, an operator needs to instantly pull up the spatial environment to debug and service it remotely. Speed of rendering is directly tied to operational uptime.
Around Chinese New Year, we are officially launching our end-to-end community scanning workflow. We want to mobilize the Auki community to build the world's largest open-source dataset of indoor environments for robotics research.
There will be two ways to earn $AUKI:
All captured data will be open-sourced on Hugging Face to push the state of the art in robotics research forward. A vital note on privacy: Auki is not a data collection company. Normally, your spatial data is completely sovereign and stays with you. This specific initiative is a 100% opt-in experiment to generate open-source training data for the broader industry.
Security Notice: Our old vanity URL was hijacked by bad actors. If you want to hang out with the community and join our off-the-record AMAs after the broadcast, please only use our official, secure link: Discord.
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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