289 pointsby kensaiJul 24, 2026

10 Comments

rlupiJul 24, 2026
It's nice to see partnerships between European startups.
DarkNova6Jul 24, 2026
Wasn’t Flux purchased by Meta?
xnxJul 24, 2026
johnbarronJul 24, 2026
If Amazon does not buy them, the CEO should be fired...
windexh8erJul 24, 2026
I think you meant to type "promoted".
kensaiJul 24, 2026
Are you American? We would prefer it to stay a European company. I personally hope Mistral buys them or somehow they unite to make a stand.
TenokeJul 24, 2026
Mistral is much worse in its respective field than Flux in their own so I hope not.
vanviegenJul 24, 2026
Perhaps.. Mistral seems to be focussing more on LLM application rather than foundation models. Seeing that the latter may be becoming commodities, Mistral may come out ahead.
YokohiiiJul 24, 2026
BFL resides in the same region as BMW and Audi. Quite wealthy and pretty fierce to protect their car industry. If Audi or any other german car maker sees BFL as the future of automation, it will be rather hard to buy them out.
vessenesJul 24, 2026
Really interesting. Upshot: a well trained multimodal video generation model has a world representation model trained inside it. They’ve done some work lifting this world model out and deploying it to robots, where it seems to work well.

On the one hand, this isn’t a new idea, and the quality video models certainly have understanding of materials, light, the world (at least in an Occam’s razor sense of understanding). I’m not aware of a video lab that’s turned itself into a robot lab yet, though; perhaps this would be a first, or a new sort of obvious-in-retrospect business path: train video model, sell video generation, scale, use scale to train robot things: profit.

I found their hands very interesting - looks like a bunch of stuff hidden in gloves - Xiami’s Robotics-1 foundation model just released videos of users training on some pretty standard looking grippers; to the point that there are demo videos of people putting on gripper type gloves to make video to train that model.

The BFL model looks like it doesn’t need that at all. Given the difficulty of the hardware side, I’ll be curious to see what they do with this.

mike_hearnJul 24, 2026
I think this tactic is standard, no? Nvidia has demoed robots being trained using video generation models, and Waymo has been doing that for a while too.

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...

lairvJul 24, 2026
FYI several other video labs are getting into robotics

Luma Labs https://lumalabs.ai/news/luma-open-physical-ai-lab

Runway https://runway.com/product/robotics

GiffertonThe3rdJul 24, 2026
The video at around 3.30min, where the robot arm took 3 attempts to reseat the window trim, was quite unnerving - I have not seen such resolving before. Is it new or am I way out of the loop?
raJul 24, 2026
Yes that was impressive.
dinfinityJul 24, 2026
You are indeed out of the loop. Google did something arguably more impressive more than a year ago, with a VLA based bot replacing a tensioned timing belt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAFiuEP7iE
quadratureJul 24, 2026
if you want to catch up, i would say Generalist is the state of the art in dexterous manipulation tasks, you can learn more here https://generalistai.com/blog/gen-1
takdJul 24, 2026
Amazing work.

u.i. Zugló robot mikor?

flufluflufluffyJul 24, 2026
Ok the phrasing here, it’s, it’s just -

> However, compared to more specialized approaches for representation learning they produce less disentangled representations, which puts a ceiling on their usefulness for tasks that require world understanding.

Only an LLM would use a less disentangled representation of the concept “more entangled” when trying to explain to people in the real world why less disentangled representations are not as useful for modeling the real world.

pennomiJul 24, 2026
Bad news, humans write silly things all the time. If anything, LLMs are less likely to make awkward phrasings than people, because they aren’t found in the training data very often.
phoghedJul 24, 2026
We’re just pulling signs of LLM touched writing out of our ass now. Might be time to move on from the accusations, assume all writing is at least LLM assisted and judge it purely on the quality.
visargaJul 24, 2026
I really hope this is how we are going to adapt to LLM era.
teodosinJul 24, 2026
Yeah, as if people haven't used words like "irregardless" way before LLM's already
cwilluJul 24, 2026
After all, the LLM's learned it from somewhere
stronglikedanJul 24, 2026
> Ok the phrasing here, it’s, it’s just -

That dash definitely means an LLM wrote this comment. /s

cwilluJul 24, 2026
Nah, that was an n-dash, which is widely respected as humans-only.
flufluflufluffyJul 24, 2026
goddamn people it’s a joke
doubleorsevenJul 24, 2026
this is the future. but also the present.

if you know some one out of the software development/engineering worlds, please forward this to them

htrpJul 24, 2026
OpenAi cries in sora
idiotsecantJul 24, 2026
We're barreling head-on into a crisis where humans have even less value unless they own the means of production. Dark days ahead, friends.
altern8Jul 24, 2026
This is awesome.

What's sad to me is that we have all this awesome technology, but movies are worse than ever.

I usually watch movies from decades ago just to find something decent and it's amazing how with goofy-looking puppets the storytelling was 1000 times better.

This is probably an unrelated rant, sorry

phoghedJul 24, 2026
Survivorship bias, possible that you just aren’t watching all the shitty ones that nobody remembers.
acdangerJul 24, 2026
time is the great filter
altern8Jul 24, 2026
What's a good recent movie I could watch? Today is Friday
phoghedJul 24, 2026
Was going to pull out my default recommendation of Oldboy but then I realized it’s 23 years old, which just aged me greatly
altern8Jul 24, 2026
Welcome to the club! :-)
thomastjefferyJul 24, 2026
No Other Choice (by the same director) is incredible, and even relevant to this post.
RebelgeckoJul 24, 2026
Odyssey is supposed to be pretty good. Main complaint I've seen is that it's not as horny as the source material.
altern8Jul 24, 2026
Thank you! I'll take a look
mejutocoJul 24, 2026
The sheep detectives is pretty good

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32565993/

altern8Jul 24, 2026
Thanks! I'll take a look
thomastjefferyJul 24, 2026
Do you like horror? That's the only genre where risky projects are getting consistent funding. Obsession and Backrooms are both really good.
altern8Jul 24, 2026
That's exactly the ones I like! On Saturdays I watch cheesy horror movies from the 80s.

But with my GF I watch whatever is rated >= 8 on Imdb and the 8s from years ago are ALWAYS much, much better than the recent ones.

Maybe I just don't like the style. All the over explaining, etc.

vanviegenJul 24, 2026
I think most movies drop a bit in IMDb score over their first few years. That might (partly) explain it. Or you just prefer older movies . :-)
altern8Jul 24, 2026
Interesting! I didn't know that. Could be both, too :-)
stronglikedanJul 24, 2026
I regularly stream movies from Screambox, FilmRise and Alter as background music while I work from home. I love cheesy horror, but they're just bad enough to keep me company without distracting me
throwthrowuknowJul 24, 2026
OP replied but I’m chipping in too, I’ve also been watching a lot of older movies specifically the more B list and C list which weren’t successful cult classics and they’re still better than anything new. The low production and low talent C list ones are still cheesy and the performances don’t land anywhere near as well as they could but they feel more genuine and creative than what passes for a movie these days.
doctorpanglossJul 24, 2026
would you refuse to invest in BFL because Robin Rombach doesn't know anything about making movies?

sora is done. can you find me one person brave enough to say, "Bill Peebles, a nice guy, doesn't know anything about making movies?" this isn't just a VC problem, this is why it is called the Hollywood No, but that said: maybe the hollywood no is the problem? in video games it has been called Toxic Positivity. are you getting it now?