AMA with Auki: Building the real world web for robots and AI

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Hi Reddit, this is Tracy from Auki. We like to make the controversial claim that Satoshi’s legacy is not Bitcoin. 100 years from now, what we’ll remember Satoshi for is starting the decentralization movement that made the physical world accessible to AI.

Why? Because 70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and labor, so making the physical world accessible to AI represents a 3X increase in the TAM of AI in general. Spatial computing – the art of teaching digital devices to understand the real world – is a prerequisite for the future of robotics, physical AI, and smart cities.

This is not lost on the tech giants. Last year on Lex Fridman’s podcast, Elon Musk was asked what it would take to win the AI race. He answered that you’ll need two things: the best compute and the best data. He’d already spent $400M on his new “gigafactory of compute,” and for the best data, he’s counting on his Optimus robot to be the largest source of data in the world.

Elon Musk is not alone in this realization. All of the largest tech companies in the world including Google and Meta are pouring billions of dollars into owning this foundational layer of the future of the internet. They are building a massive surveillance apparatus to collect all of the world’s spatial data. Optimus isn’t in our homes yet, but this is already happening with Google Streetview, Meta’s smart glasses, Niantic’s Pokémon Go, the list goes on. Whoever wins the AI race will be in a position of almost unimaginable power to monitor and modify our very thoughts.

Sounds like a nightmare; what can we do about it? Auki is making the physical world accessible to AI by building an open source and decentralized real world web: a way for robots and digital devices like smart glasses and phones to browse, navigate, and search physical locations. Think of it as the inverse of how the world wide web allows us to browse, navigate, and search digital information.

Unlike literally everyone else (including other web3 projects), we don’t collect any of the data. Instead, we allow venue owners to collect and host their own data, so that it’s shared only between the venue and visiting devices/robots without any Big Brother.

Auki's goal is to become the decentralized nervous system of AI in the real world, providing collaborative spatial reasoning for the next 100 billion devices on Earth and beyond.

We started in 2019 creating shared augmented reality overlays for the tabletop game Warhammer 40k, invented and patented a technique called instant calibration that lets multiple devices calibrate into a shared coordinate system just by scanning a QR code, and raised money in 2021 to build out our collaborative spatial computing protocol for the AR metaverse. Fast forward to today, and that same protocol is used by robots, smart glasses, and AI copilots to understand the real world.

A few 2025 highlights:

• Last month our Unitree G1 humanoid robot, Terri, connected to the real world web domain of WOW Summit and could autonomously navigate the conference venue despite never having been there before.
• We've integrated a number of other robots with the real world web too, including those from leading Chinese robotics companies PadBot and Slamtec, and our list of robotics partners is growing rapidly.
  
• Cactus, our spatial AI solution for retail and warehouses, is being deployed in three continents (soon four hopefully!) and proving that AI copilots for physical work are commercially viable. It already brings in 7 digit ARR and our current deal pipeline is over $200M ARR.
• Our ecosystem is growing as builders realize they need privacy-preserving spatial awareness: Mentra is building open source smart glasses, Zappar is building app-free navigation for the blind, Alpha AI is pioneering the low-altitude economy in Hong Kong with drone inspections and deliveries, Mika is building an error-detecting AI copilot for physical work, and many more. Watch State of the Auki Network 2025 for an overview.
  
• We co-founded Intercognitive, a foundation for establishing global standards for AI accessibility and interoperability.
  
• Over 12M $AUKI tokens have been burned to pay for network usage, and our community has earned over $1.2M worth of tokens as rewards for running nodes and setting up domains.
  
• TODAY on our weekly community update we demoed the world’s first app agnostic, device agnostic spatial orchestration between robots from different manufacturers and smart glasses.
  

Unlocking physical AI is the highest leverage thing we can do as a civilization, and Auki is the ONLY company doing that without centralized data collection. Our big bet is that the decentralization movement will realize there are more important things to decentralize than the money supply: all of our real world data. That will be Satoshi’s legacy.

Our CEO u/Metaversed does weekly live community updates and AMAs in Discord and livestream them to X, and we’ll both be around to answer questions here on Reddit too. Ask me anything!

A few talks:

Fortune Brainstorm AI: The Robot Will See You Now

SuperAI: DePIN: The Decentralized Nervous System of Physical AI

AWE: The Great Reversal

WOW Summit: Satoshi’s Legacy: the decentralized machine perception network

Whitepaper: https://auki.com/whitepaper

Website: https://auki.com/

X: https://x.com/AukiNetwork

Discord: https://discord.gg/aukiverse

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aukilabs/

Subreddit: r/AukiLabs

Roadmap to world domination