Applied Intuition

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in simulation is a scalable strategy to learn dexterous skills, but naive exploration from scratch often fails to discover manipulation strategies for diverse objects. At Applied Intuition, we propose X-Reset: we resolve the exploration problem by randomly sampling RL resets from human hand-object states. ➡️ Kinematic retargeting from human to robot simply seeds exploration, so the embodiment gap does not get in the way ➡️ Human hands are used for resets rather than reference motions, so it drops into existing generalist RL pipelines ➡️ Massive learning boost across different reward formulations ➡️ Zero real-world robot data in training We see promising results from this straightforward recipe: 🛠️ A single policy manipulating a wide range of objects, from small markers to heavy power drills, to any goal pose 🤖 Zero-shot generalization beyond the training set (DexYCB), and a pre-trained backbone that fine-tunes on novel objects without additional human demonstrations 🔬 Zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with off-the-shelf object pose-tracking models, including recovery behaviors under real-world perturbations We are continuously expanding robotics research at Applied Intuition beyond X-Reset, with the bounds of simulation and synthetic data for dexterous manipulation pushed. Stay tuned and join us! 🌐 Project page: xreset-applied.github.io 📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2609.35715 Nice work from Prithwish Dan Chenyang Ma!

You don’t have a dashboard for your most important metric - Talent Density. When Paraform first launched our Talent Density Index in April it became a reference point for most asking the same question: who actually has the best people? Talent is constantly in motion. The best people move, teams evolve, and a company’s talent density can change quickly. That’s why we believe talent density should be measured in real time. Today, we’re excited to release our latest edition of our Talent Density Index. At Paraform, we’ve built the richest hiring dataset across companies and candidates to model talent as a market shaped by supply, demand and competition. That allows us to rank which companies consistently attract, develop and retain the people the market values most Here are the new top 15 ↓ #1 Safe Superintelligence Inc. Ilya Sutskever + Daniel Levy lead a lean team, concentrating senior frontier AI researchers around one goal: safe superintelligence. #2 Anthropic The lab has become a magnet for some of AI’s most sought-after researchers and engineers. #3 OpenAI The talent factory much of AI recruits from. Its alumni founded labs #1, #2 and #4, while its own research and engineering bench remains deep. #4 Thinking Machines Lab Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's retains a deep bench across frontier research, even after high-profile departures. #5 Applied Intuition Qasar Younis + Peter Ludwig team includes 1,000+ engineers, 40+ former CTOs and 30+ former founders building physical AI. #6 Modal Erik Bernhardsson + Akshat Bubna's team includes Olympiad medalists, researchers and the creators of Seaborn and Luigi. #7 Decagon Jesse Zhang + Ashwin Sreenivas assembled a team combining deep engineering and applied AI expertise with the experience of former founders. #8 Pika Demi G. + Chenlin Meng bring Stanford AI research experience; Chenlin co-authoring DDIM, a foundational diffusion-model paper. #9 Fireworks AI Former PyTorch head Lin Qiao, core maintainer Dmytro Dzhulgakov and Google Vertex AI lead Chenyu Zhao are among its founders. #10 Cohere Aidan Gomez + Nick Frosst bring Google Brain research roots to a team whose leadership includes former Meta AI research head Joelle Pineau. #11 Glean Arvind Jain, a former Google Distinguished Engineer, and his co-founders bring experience leading Google’s Chrome Speed team and technical teams at Facebook. #12 LangChain Harrison Chase + Ankush Gola built the default open-source framework for LLM agents and now where the strongest builders in the AI app ecosystem want to work. #13 Ramp Eric Glyman + Karim Atiyeh set an early hiring bar: “If this person started a company would we join them?” #14 Together AI Vipul Ved Prakash + Ce Zhang's founding team includes FlashAttention co-creators, bringing deep AI systems expertise. #15 Cognition Scott Wu brought 10 IOI gold medals to the founding team, with its bench still expanding. See the full Top 50 here: https://lnkd.in/gSZHWJid