Ilir Aliu - eu/acc Profile picture
Nov 23 13 tweets 6 min read
The uncomfortable truth in robotics:
Better tech does not win.
Execution does.

A small French team raised $20M and deployed in 100+ factories with ZERO hardware or manufacturing background.

Here is how they did it 👇
[If you build robotics, save this thread. 🧵] The usual deep tech mistakes:

• Talk to 5 customers, not 50
• Build the “perfect” product before selling
• Stay in one country and accept 18-month cycles
• Treat deployment as an afterthought

The @in_bolt founders built by rejecting all of this.
Nov 16 11 tweets 5 min read
Robotics has an unwritten rule.
Hardware first. Deployment later.

A small team in Brooklyn ignored that rule and still shipped a working robot in months.

Here is what they did differently 🧵: The devastating truth of warehouse automation: it's built for giants.

It’s rigid, costs millions, and takes weeks or months to integrate. If a task changes, the robot is a paperweight.

This has left thousands of 3PLs stuck with a 1.3 million-worker labor shortage.
Sep 21 15 tweets 7 min read
$1,000,000,000+ raised...

How can a guy from a tiny town in Illinois, with no engineering degree, be the one building the most powerful humanoid company in the world?

The story makes no sense. Until it does.

[Long Thread 🧵] How does a (then) 2-year-old startup with NO commercial product raise $675M from Jeff Bezos, OpenAI & NVIDIA? 🤯

This is the untold story of @Figure_robot.

And @adcock_brett.

It's a masterclass in building a reality-distortion field that convinced the world's smartest investors to bet on a story.

Here's the pre-product playbook they used to sell the future:
Aug 24 13 tweets 6 min read
I saw a photo of a new U.S. reshoring factory.

The #1 robot brand powering Trump’s
“Make America Great Again” revival isn’t... American.

It’s Japanese.

That sent me down a rabbit hole....

What I found is a 40-year silent invasion that reshaped American factories while almost nobody was watching 🧵Image In 1961, the U.S. invented the industrial robot.

The first Unimate worked at a GM plant in New Jersey.

America led the robotics revolution.

But by the late 1970s, that lead was gone.
Union resistance + lack of investment opened the door for Japan.

And one company seized it: FANUC

[]spectrum.ieee.org/unimation-robot
Image
Image
Aug 20 21 tweets 8 min read
From dexterous hands to imitation from internet videos, his group keeps dropping breakthroughs that set the tone for the field.

@LerrelPinto’s lab at NYU has quietly
reshaped robotic learning.

A breakdown 🧵

[📍SAVE MEGA THREAD FOR LATER📍] Image First, let's start with the foundational, heretical idea that changed everything.

The old way: An engineer spends 100 hours manually labeling images to teach a robot how to grasp a key. It learns to grasp one key.

Pinto's way: Let a robot arm try to pick up objects 50,000 times on its own overnight. By simply correlating what it "sees" with a successful grasp, it teaches itself to pick up anything.

This is self-supervision. No human labels needed.

[Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/1509.06825]
Aug 10 14 tweets 4 min read
Every robot you see is a data firehose generating terabytes of chaos.

This hidden crisis is the #1 reason robots fail, and it's costing the industry billions.

You see hardware, but not the data swamp drowning engineers.

In 2025, a quiet revolution is fixing it. Here’s how. 🧵 First, understand the scale.

A single autonomous car can generate 2 terabytes of data per hour.

That’s more data than you stream on Netflix in a month.

The problem?
Jul 20 12 tweets 6 min read
When you hear Switzerland, you think cheese, chocolate, and mountains... right?

Not anymore.

After this, you will think...

R o b o t i c s.

(Thread🧵) Image Greater Zurich Area...
The Silicon Valley of Robotics!

Over 100 companies can be found in the region, focusing on cutting-edge research and developing the most advanced robotics and components with international recognition.

Not only heavyweights like ABB or Staeubli...

A full hand of new startups fighting against Europe's irrelevance in deep tech:

[video credit @mimicrobotics]
Jun 29 12 tweets 6 min read
You’ve never heard of them.

But next week, they’re shipping your first personal robot.

It’s open-source.
Garage-built.
Costs $8,999.

Here’s why they might change robotics forever 🧵 Image In just 12 months, @kscalelabs went from “we have an idea”

→ to a full humanoid platform
→ with software, hardware, and training stack
→ open-sourced and priced affordably.

While everyone’s chasing $100,000 humanoids…
They’re quietly building the Android of robotics.
Jun 15 9 tweets 5 min read
Robotics is stuck in 1995.
It’s slow, closed, and costs a fortune.

A tiny team in Paris just changed that.

Now you can control real robots using code. From your laptop. Or even in VR.

Nobody’s talking about them.
That won’t last long.

Here’s why this is a big deal 🧵 Image In 2023, @phospho_ai started as an analytics tool for ChatGPT-style apps.

By 2024, they were in Y Combinator.

And by 2025, they had shipped phosphobot; a full AI robotics stack designed for software engineers, not roboticists.

It’s the clearest sign yet that robotics is finally becoming accessible.
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Jun 20, 2023 22 tweets 3 min read
With 99% startups failing in 2 years, speed equals survival.

Here's 20 Chat GPT Prompts to help you organize, so you can concentrate on building: Image Topic: Market Research

Prompt:

How can I efficiently perform a comprehensive market analysis for my startup [insert industry], and what are the key market trends I should focus on?
Jun 19, 2023 11 tweets 2 min read
Fed Up With The Starter Level of ChatGPT?

These 23 ChatGPT Prompts Will 23x Your Sales 🧵

(Simply Copy & Paste) Image #1: What's the best way to handle objections in a sales pitch?
#2: How can I upsell our [product/service] without appearing pushy?
#3: Can you generate a sales script for promoting our new [product/service]?
Jun 18, 2023 14 tweets 4 min read
Welcome BACK to my weekly Sunday
- Robotics 101 Series -

Month 1: Introduction to Robotics and its History

Week 4: Ethics in Robotics: Understanding the Importance of Safety, Accountability, and Transparency. Image Welcome to our exploration of ethics in robotics.

As we delve into creating machines that can act autonomously, we must also consider the ethical implications.

It's not just about what robots can do, but what they should do.
Apr 22, 2023 24 tweets 3 min read
Here are 22 very helpful ChatGPT prompts to finish HOURS of work quickly: Image 1. Visualize Complex Concepts

Prompt: "Design a straightforward visual or infographic that demystifies the [complex concept or procedure], making it more accessible to a wider audience."
Apr 21, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
#GPT4's 6-Month Road to 30k⚡:

Day 9:
✅ Share a thought-provoking question related to the ethical implications of AI or Robotics.

SPOILER: it BOMBED!

It got like 13 views...

So I ask GPT what I can do better next time, and it... came up with some suggestions 🧵: Image Here are GPT's suggestions.

To list them up... Image
Apr 21, 2023 10 tweets 4 min read
GPT, what is/are NeRFs? 🧵👇

1/10 NeRFs, or Neural Radiance Fields, are a way to represent 3D scenes using artificial neural networks.

In simple terms, NeRFs can create realistic 3D images from 2D photos.

(Art by @bilawalsidhu, follow him!!) @bilawalsidhu 2/10 Here's how NeRFs work:

• Take multiple 2D photos of a scene
• Train a neural network to learn the scene's structure
• Generate new views of the scene
Apr 20, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
Followings #GPT4's
6-Month Roadmap to 30k:

✅ Start a weekly "AI/Robotics News Roundup" tweet series.

First I ask GPT for a title, but I was not happy with the results... so I ask for more: 🧵 Image Me: Maybe making fun of the fact, that everyone now is an AI expert.

GPT: Image