Home of Open Source Robotics

Joined February 2025
The Age of Machines Should Belong to All of Us.
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500,000+ hours of raw video behind one robotics model. A city subsidising companies' data purchases. China's robotics data work is turning into a supply chain. This is THOR Signals, our new series on the robotics data market, starting with China. For context, China accounted for 59% of global industrial robot installations in 2025. Within that industry, three roles are taking shape: • @beingbeyond_: model development BeingBeyond builds models that help robots understand their surroundings and perform physical tasks. For Being-H0.8, the model behind those 500,000+ hours, raw video was filtered, reconstructed and reviewed before training. • @PaXiniAI: specialist data supply PaXini makes tactile sensors and training data combining vision, touch and movement. BeingBeyond names it an important data partner for Being-H0.8. • @LightwheelAI: connecting training with deployment Lightwheel supplies simulation, demonstration data and evaluation, and reported about $100M in Q1 2026 orders. At automaker Geely, factory demonstrations feed training, and testing shows where more data is needed. Government is shaping demand too. Hangzhou's 2026–2027 action plan subsidises companies' purchases of data products and services (up to 30%, capped at RMB300,000). The national pilot base there invited outside data partners on 30 September across 25 task scenarios. What we don't know yet: how much teams outsource, and which services they buy repeatedly. For THOR, that's the question: which tasks do teams commission externally, and why choose a specialist over building in-house? More from THOR in China to come. THOR Signals · China
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Sources • China industrial robot installations, 2025: IFR ifr.org/downloads/press_docs… • Being-H0.8: research.beingbeyond.com/bei… • BeingBeyond × PaXini: beingbeyond.com/en/newsInfo/… • Lightwheel Q1 2026 orders: lightwheel.ai/media/q1-order… • Lightwheel × Geely: lightwheel.ai/media/geely-hu… • Hangzhou action plan: zfgb.hangzhou.gov.cn/11/1012… • Hangzhou pilot base partner call: jszn.cn/article/992325037855…
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Robotics training data needs to reflect the environments where robots will work. @haitzu on THOR’s open data marketplace at Exploit Summit: “If these robots need to be everywhere, what we need to do is to get as many people from around the world contributing that data.”
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The people helping robots learn should be rewarded for their work, whether collecting, annotating or verifying training data. Open networks and crypto incentives can help make that happen at scale. Thanks @0xSammy for the breakdown. Full report via @KhalaResearch
High-quality human demonstrations will become invaluable as robots learn to perform more of our everyday tasks Decentralized crypto incentives are primed to coordinate contributors globally + reward useful training data The table compares peaq, THOR, BitRobot + Axis: what each produces, who pays + how value could reach the token Our latest @KhalaResearch report breaks down the opportunity below Expect more to come as this market segment heats up! So turn notis on and we welcome any feedback on our report below!
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"If a VLM can do these annotations, then a lab would self-annotate." Where general-purpose VLMs still struggle, labs have to look elsewhere: tracking a hand hidden behind an object, labelling a cup going from full to empty, marking where one action ends and the next begins. The specialists who do this well are scattered and hard to find. THOR is building an open marketplace connecting labs with the specialists who can do the work.
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Shenzhen is the home for hardware AI
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The embodied AI data market is forecast to grow from an estimated $536M in 2025 to $4.9B by 2032. Roughly 9x in seven years. But volume alone isn't enough. A demonstration recorded for one robot arm can be useless to a lab training a different one. Labs need data cut into individual actions, labelled with language instructions and checked for consistency, all to their own spec. THOR starts with what the lab needs, then turns those requirements into paid annotation and verification tasks for providers on Bittensor. Outputs are checked against the lab’s specifications. We're building so labs can scale their data operations without coordinating every provider themselves.
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Data is THOR's entry point. Serving labs builds the revenue, expertise and relationships behind our wider vision across robotics models and open-source hardware. More on the robotics data market, what labs need and where THOR fits: thormachines.ai/docs/market/…
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THOR Group retweeted
High-quality human demonstrations will become invaluable as robots learn to perform more of our everyday tasks Decentralized crypto incentives are primed to coordinate contributors globally + reward useful training data The table compares peaq, THOR, BitRobot + Axis: what each produces, who pays + how value could reach the token Our latest @KhalaResearch report breaks down the opportunity below Expect more to come as this market segment heats up! So turn notis on and we welcome any feedback on our report below!
Robotics is still waiting for its "ChatGPT" moment Language models had the internet to learn from, while robots need diverse physical demonstrations that are expensive to collect Bessemer estimated just 300,000 hours of robot manipulation data globally in April, while others believe robotics could require 100M+ training hours Bessemer projects $3B+ in robot-data spending over two years Open networks are using crypto incentives to coordinate contributors across simulation, teleoperation and human video collection Axis reports 7M+ trajectories from 220K+ contributors, with its data lifting task success from 83.9% to 88.8% on the LIBERO-Plus simulation benchmark Our latest report explores the data opportunity through Axis, BitRobot, Eastworlds & THOR Full report in the next post below
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This is why we’re building THOR around robotics data, in the open. Serving demand for annotation and verification builds revenue, expertise and customer relationships that compound as we pursue our vision across models and hardware. We’re building for where robotics goes next.
The winning robotics data business has a much higher terminal value than investors are underwriting today. Robotics will be a long race with many twists and turns, but when the ChatGPT moment hits, the winning data player will be in a very strong strategic position to capture token value. They will have large revenue, a strong balance sheet, talent density, deployments experience, and hardware supply chain knowledge. When it comes time to blitzscale they will be amongst the players that can capture the most value. The reason this is misunderstood today is because most people are using traditional LLM data businesses as a prior for robotics data businesses and what their terminal value could be. I posit this is incorrect framing. Because the model and harness are integrated in LLMs, there is very little room for data players to play meaningfully in the token value flow in the long term. In robotics this is exactly the opposite, the model and harness (hardware) are separate, the pretraining era is just beginning, there are many more dependencies on distributors/deployers, and there is a large surface area for other players than just models to capture value. Open source will also play a larger role earlier in the robotics race, as all prior LLM learnings will be incorporated as the race is run. This also creates opportunities for long term infrastructure players. There is a massive amount of terminal value in winning robotics data and participating in the path of the industry from a position of strength. From first principles: The endgame of robotics will take place over the next decade. Empirically, today, no player has enough data, enough model intelligence, or sufficient hardware to facilitate a fast revenue takeoff in the field. No player has reasoned through the right sales motion either, which can take years to develop pilots and move to production. Serious players are correctly focused on scaling up pretraining/deep learning vs. who has the best model, deployment, or hardware today. The robotics data business takes participants on a global hunt to build data, supply chains, and hardware. Along the way it also teaches deployment and deep knowledge of SOTA model development. Winning data participants also get the first crack at the still nascent robotics RL market, which will likely be the next large revenue stream after pretraining. As they compete to win data, data players must develop incredible talent density across both Asia and the US. The winning data business will have both Asian and North American DNA. Canada 🇨🇦 encompasses an interesting cultural mixture of both of these parts of the world. Bullish Canadian Robotics Mafias, more specifically Waterloo/Toronto. So: What would constitute a strong strategic position to capture value once the ChatGPT moment of robotics hits? You need a large revenue base, a strong balance sheet, and talent density + experience across data, deployments, hardware, supply chain, and RL. The hyperscalers, the frontier labs, and the winning data player all qualify. Anyone under time pressure in what will be a long race is in a weaker strategic position in my view. Given the costs of integrated hardware+software+deployment, this would actually be most robotics-native players. They will depend on VC interest, which can be fickle.
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Robots have no equivalent of the internet to learn physical work from. THOR’s mission is to build that foundation in the open. Annotation is where that journey begins. Read our manifesto: thormachines.ai/manifesto/
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Join our Telegram community to ask questions, follow progress and help shape what we build. t.me/THORMachines
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THOR Group retweeted
Pylon Partners has acquired SN112 on Bittensor to launch THOR Group, a robotics holding company for data, models and hardware. You've seen the headlines: robotics is deeply bottlenecked across data, models and hardware. The race for Physical AI is nowhere near complete, and my firm will ensure @THORMachines plays a critical role for the this new revolution I started THOR Group because I believe that globalisation and shared collaboration will accelerate robotics research for everyone, not just the major labs To achieve this, we will partner with the best of Bittensor to build critical infrastructure that researchers and roboticists need to help usher in physical AI. At the request of investors and researchers in industry, THOR Group will start with THOR Data, encompassing human demonstration + simulation data sourced by our vast network. I look forward to sharing our progress from the last few months This is day one for THOR.
OFFICIAL: Pylon Partners Acquires SN112 to Launch THOR Group
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