AI Builders Meetup

This Month's Feature: Physical AI with Apollo Timbers of Second Robotics
We're going hands-on with physical AI — the leap from AI that lives on a screen to AI that senses, reasons, and acts in the real world. Instead of chatbots and copilots, we're talking about machines that perceive their surroundings and respond in real time. It's where the models we've been experimenting with meet cameras, sensors, and the messy real world.

Leading the night is Apollo Timbers of Second Robotics, a St. Louis shop building AI-driven robots from the ground up. Apollo will introduce Sophie (Prototype 01) an omni-wheel-drive co-robot with a 6-axis arm that takes in the world through cameras and a built-in audio neural net. She isn't rolling across the floor on her own quite yet, but she sees, hears, and interfaces with the room in real time.
Apollo will demo Sophie live — including a look at her using powerful OCR (optical character recognition) to read pages straight out of a book — and make the case for when local computer vision actually beats sending everything to the cloud. From there he'll whiteboard her current "brain" on the spot: how she works today and where Second Robotics is taking her next. He'll also open the doors of his AI Lab office to show how these machines are really built, hardware and intelligence alike.
Come ready to ask questions, get close to the hardware, and see what "AI-native" looks like when it has eyes, ears, and a reach.