Comment by echelon
4 days ago
We need open source versions of these.
1. We need the capability to build the servos, actuators, etc. Supply chain, factories, specialized vendors.
2. We need to dump the firmware, decompile it, extract the models, and liberate it all. AI will help immensely with that. We can literally hijack everything software that isn't delivered over cloud now - so this is the easy part. We can then fine tune, adapt to new tasks, etc. Grabbing the brain = easy.
So the hard part is the hardware itself. The brain will belong to us soon enough.
Robotics distillation will be a big thing. You won't even have to farm out billions of requests across residential gateways. You just need to buy one unit.
You can't stop the software from becoming open.
Startup idea: AI model to dump the firmware from DJI, Unitree, etc. etc. and turn it into human-readable code. Broad utility across every industry with tons of willing buyers.
Hardware, though. We need that part.
You can’t raise money for theft / piracy. Just have your claw guide you through the hardware.
You can create a bounty through a nonprofit foundation, and use donations that are tax deductible to fund reverse engineering and creating an open version under an open license that defends against commercial capture.
This is one of the superpowers of LLMs and generative AI I think, providing cheap reverse engineering superpowers to clean room reimplement proprietary and closed systems as open source systems. Fiat, tokens, and context goes in, technology sovereignty comes out. In the same way people talk about a software factory, think about a reverse engineering factory. You are laundering the knowledge and tradecraft embodied in artifacts, both digital and physical, through model training and inference.
Open hardware developed by the above process can be produced by contract hardware manufacturers or someone CrowdSupply facilitates. If an expert opinion is needed on this, I’d recommend Andrew Huang of bunnie studios.
https://bounties.fulu.org/
https://www.fulu.org/
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/cheap-reverse-engineer...
https://www.bunniestudios.com/
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(think in systems)
It's an engineering tool. I can think of dozens of completely legit use cases off the top of my head and there are probably hundreds more.
Security review, checking for bugs or spyware, repairing your own hardware you own, modifying your own hardware you own, measuring performance, ...
It's legitimate as hell.