Hello HN, I'm talking to ML researchers here, There is a pretty challenging yet unexplored problem in ML yet - hardware engineering.

So far, everything goes against us solving this problem - pretrain data is basically inexistent (no abundance like in NLP/computer vision), there are fundamental gaps in research in the area - e.g. there is no way to encode engineering-level physics information into neural nets (no specialty VAEs/transformers oriented for it), simulating engineering solutions was very expensive up until recently (there are 2024 GPU-run simulators which run 100-1000x faster than anything before them), and on top of it it’s a domain-knowledge heavy ML task.

I’ve fell in love with the problem a few months ago, and I do believe that now is the time to solve this problem. The data scarcity problem is solvable via RL - there were recent advancements in RL that make it stable on smaller training data (see SimbaV2/BROnet), engineering-level simulation can be done via PINOs (Physics Informed Neural Operators - like physics-informed NNs, but 10-100x faster and more accurate), and 3d detection/segmentation/generation models are becoming nearly perfect. And that’s really all we need. I am looking to gather a team of 4-10 people that would solve this problem.

The reason hardware engineering is so important is that if we reliably engineer hardware, we get to scale up our manufacturing, where it becomes much cheaper and we improve on all physical needs of the humanity - more energy generation, physical goods, automotive, housing - everything that uses mass manufacturing to work.

Again, I am looking for a team that would solve this problem: 1. I am an embodied AI researcher myself, mostly in RL and coming from some MechE background. 2. One or two computer vision people, 3. High-performance compute engineer for i.e. RL environments, 4. Any AI researchers who want to contribute.

There is also a market opportunity that can be explored too, so count that in if you wish. It will take a few months to a year to come up with a prototype. I did my research, although that’s basically an empty field yet, and we’ll need to work together to hack together all the inputs. I have also a created RL environment that could be used for training (currently closed-source).

Let us lay the foundation for a technology/create a product that would could benefit millions of people!

Comment if you want to join/mail me to maksymriabov2004@gmail.com. Everybody is welcome if you have at least published a paper in some of the aforementioned areas.