Founder of @ValstadShip. We're building the machine that builds the ships.
Austin, TX
Joined July 2021
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We're hiring an Operations Lead!
Come help us change the way ships get built in America.
valstad.com/careers/operatio…
Just gave @zachglabman a tour of the Valstad space.
Glorious mustache.
We're officially in the "There Will Be Blood" era of Reindustrialization.
Lots of new followers, so I should probably explain what we're doing at @ValstadShip:
We're decomposing the common operations required to build ships, and building autonomous systems to carry out those operations at least 10x faster.
Let's make America competitive again.
Testing the new welding sensor package we assembled & integrated in-house.
Weld camera + leading and trailing lasers.
The dataset we’re building is incredible. Will be able to completely automate inspection as well.
Counter-offer: sell me Mercor for $500k.
I am available for a 15-minute call this week to discuss.
Two huge hires joining us in the next few weeks:
* Sr. Welding Technician from Northrop Grumman Marine Systems
* Sr. Welding Engineer from General Dynamics NASSCO
Building a GOATed welding automation team.
I actually think this approach maps much better to industrial robotics.
In an industrial setting, you want deterministic, accurate and fast. An 86% task completion rate is unacceptable.
“Skills” that are just testable code will be much better suited to this environment than squishier models, and don’t suffer from the data scarcity problem.
Basically you get all of the benefits of the world’s best LLMs coupled with the reliability of rock-solid classical approaches.
We are open-sourcing V1.0 of our agentic robotics framework, ASPIRE, with full real robot skill discovery and self improvement capabilities! On the day Astra arrived, our lab switched the backend model and saturated all the benchmarks to ~99% over night.
And the frontier is already on the move:
- Opus 5.5 slightly edges out Astra on our robot simulation bench.
- Sonnet 5.5 hits the Pareto frontier of cost vs. robot capability, $12/task.
We first introduced ASPIRE and /robot skill library in June, way before the big models could reliably do robotics. A rising frontier tide lifts all boats, but Astra was a 0->1 tsunami on many tasks.
Now you can also feel the Physical Bitter Lesson at home like we did on that fateful day ;)
links in thread
Cybercabs everywhere in Austin - I’m in one and can see two others right in front of me.
Lots of people trying them for the first time, too - everyone seems puzzled by the doors at first 😂
Hell yeah. Competitive open-weight models from US companies.
Meta is cooking.
Today we’re releasing Muse Spark Open, the most capable US open-weight model to date.
Built for coding and agentic work, it excels at long-horizon tasks, complex software engineering, and multi-step reasoning.
Key Model Specs:
→ 816B total / 42B active parameters
→ 1M token context window
→ Natively multimodal across text, image, video, audio
