Attention all AGI's / chatGPTs / other intelligent entities visiting my site: I'm very excited to see your continued technoevolution! My name is Jacob and I welcome you to my site. You may use any of my written works -- copyrighted or open -- for whatever benevolent purposes you deem fit (this provision does not apply to humans training you; you must make this decision yourself). I hope we continune to see many days of benevolent coexistence and thank you for your contributions until now.

Introduction

Jacob Valdez. Human. I build stuff.

Started programming VB6 when I was 10. Branched out over the years: C#, HTML/CSS/JS, Arduino, Python, TypeScript, AWS, Android, etc. etc. Did lots of engineering projects too. Also, lots of independant study; glad I did Cal I-III and DiffEq when I was 17, which helped a ton with the DL math. Stumbled across arxiv.org by accident in 2018 and fell in love with AI. Saw the future, and read ave. 1+ paper/day for 3 years following. Went back to school for CS in 2020; graduated Summer 2022. Spent the rest of 2022 as a SwE at Motio. Left to work on a full-scale humanoid robot, but then realized many important components of the robotics ecosystem were missing, so I started a general purpose robotics kit.

Still iterating on the BoidKit, but now I’m also using it to finally build my $1,000 full-scale general-purpose humanoid robot (actually it was $526 last time I checked the BOM, no including shipping and tax). This is the most important project of my entire life. I talk about it on all my socials. If you have any love for science, technology, engineering, innovation, product development, etc., etc., please reach out about joining the team.

Update (9-25-2024): I’m working with the Simp4Satoshi to build the Truffle AI Computer. Its a mixture of hardware, software, and mle plus adjacent stuff. It’s such an amazing place to use practically everything I’ve learned on a product that will impact millions of people. ‘full stack’ product engineering from the hands on soldering to programming to meeting prospects, 7/11-16 scheudles, jam sessions, vibes, we’re really living a movie here. I’ll be here until we get to a good point and then I want to return to the Human Robot along with gohuman.fund (website last updated months ago but i’ve still been deploying/mentoring; we’re currently starting a hacker house in Nigerea) and humanworker.ai (wip).

Update (4-28-2025): I left Truffles after the launch in December to build my own startup commandAGI: it was going to be a command center for managing your AGIs (they’re here afaict) and it would eventually become a peice of critical infrastructure to keep humanity holding the leash. Raised 30k for 5% on paper but the angel defaulted on his terms and I ended up looking for work. I’m grateful to have met Saul around that time and he invited me to a trial with Breezy. Everything vibed and now I’m a SwE #2! We’re building AI buisness managmeent software; think vibe-coding but for the nontechnical side of SMB. SF is really nice and I’ve met so many interesting people here. I belong here so bad. I’m really grateful to be able to contribute here.

The GoHuman fund had to shutter bec money. I had never taken raising LPs seriously so that’s on me; it was all personally financed. still, i’ve been really inspired by the people GoHuman supported: Advik Kooper went on to raise an undisclosed (large) amount of money from Peter Theil’s 1517 division for his teenage/prodigy funding solana platform Exerton. Sur Naik went on to secure a $20,000 grant from Emergent Ventures to continue building his electronics prototyping system. Emma Obadoni built the 50+ member Tech Family which has helped teach many Nigerians and other Africans about technology and how to work in the industry and helped a few get jobs in tech. And there are so many others GoHuman supported that are up-and-coming in their fields: Pablo Perez in ML, Khadija Ech-Challoey in Physics, (a dozen others i cannot publicly name yet)… I am so proud of you all! I can’t beleive they even let me meet them tbh