Our mission at K-Scale Labs is to accelerate the timeline to a world with billions of general-purpose robots, by making them open-source and universally accessible. We believe this is the best route towards making humanity into a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale.

On a technical level, making real-world AI systems that work well is very difficult and requires working across a huge range of disciplines, from designing and building physical hardware, to collecting useful data from diverse real-world environments, to training and deploying machine learning models. In the face of such challenges, the advantages that developing in the open provides, in the form of reduced friction, greater collaboration, and increased visibility, greatly outweigh the monetary downsides. There is a long historical precedent for companies capitalizing on key technological shifts by adopting similar strategies, and we view this as a principled business decision in addition to a moral one.

Put differently, as a guiding principle, we are more concerned with making sure that the goal gets achieved than ensuring that no one else achieves it before us, and we expect that our own progress will be much faster and more efficient when work is done in the open. Building in the open provides a forcing function for quality that is absent in more opaque organizations, and working on deeply technical and integrated problems makes this forcing function paramount.

More importantly, however, in order for embodied intelligence to achieve its full potential, we expect that it ultimately must function in a way that allows buy-in from humanity at large. Highly-capable robots are poised to take over large amounts of labor in our homes and businesses, and in a democratic society, the only way to make rapid forward progress is if the benefits from such changes are widely shared. In other words, we expect that the only way for humanoid robots to achieve mass adoption is by being open-source, auditable, and broadly accessible.

K-Scale was started in a Palo Alto garage with the dream of building a way for everyone to share in the benefits of embodied artificial intelligence. This will not be possible without building a critical mass of people who also believe in this dream. If you believe it is important - that a world of open-source humanoid robots owned by everyone is better than a world run by a few corporations - we would be immensely grateful for your support, by contributing to our codebase, buying a robot, or simply telling your friends.

- The K-Scale Team