INSIGHTS - The OPTIM Update

INDUSTRY

The Intelligence Layer for Precision Manufacturing

Per BLS data from December 2025, there were 433,000 unfilled manufacturing job openings across the US. Deloitte and the National Association of Manufacturers project that number could reach 2.1 million by 2030, at a potential cost of $1 trillion that year alone. The skilled machinists who've

INSIGHTS

Light Is a Wave. Light Is a Particle. Light Is Neither, and We Can Prove It.

A walk through the weirdest experiment in physics, and why Einstein spent thirty years hoping it was wrong A few steps past the interferometer exhibit I wrote about last time, there's a small placard mounted on a wall. It reads, roughly: Does it surprise you that a tiny

INSIGHTS

The Tabletop That Hears Black Holes

How a 140-year-old desk experiment became the most sensitive instrument humans have ever built There's a museum exhibit I recently stood in front of that I cannot stop thinking about. On a dark steel table sits a small helium-neon laser, a piece of angled glass the size of

INSIGHTS

Catching Up on Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence, World Models, and the 3D Future of AI

From ImageNet to Marble — everything she's been building, saying, and arguing for Last issue we went deep on Yann LeCun and JEPA. This time we're covering the researcher the New York Times once dubbed the "Godmother of AI" — Fei-Fei Li. The connection isn'

INSIGHTS

Catching Up on Yann LeCun: JEPA, World Models, AMI Labs, and the War Against LLMs

Everything he's been researching, saying, and building — and why it matters If you've been watching the AI space closely this past year, you know that while the rest of Silicon Valley races to build bigger language models, Yann LeCun — Turing Award winner, co-inventor of convolutional neural

INSIGHTS

I Built a Robot Arm and Trained It to Think. Here's What I Learned.

I invest in robotics companies. I talk to founders building humanoids, manipulation systems, and autonomous machines every week. Now I've been trying to build a few robots myself. I've been learning by ordering parts, assembling a robot arm from scratch, and training an AI policy to

FOUNDERS

What 15 Robotics Founders and Investors Actually Think Over Dinner

A few weeks ago, I hosted a small dinner in San Francisco — about fifteen people around a table. Founders building robotic hands, mobile manipulators, warehouse systems, autonomous vehicles, and world models for manipulation. Investors from early-stage funds to multi-stage industrial tech platforms. A few operators. Everyone had skin in the