♚Belfast (Retrofit)♚ Your perfect maid, Belfast, has returned, master – with even more reliable strength in hand. Should you have any duties, daily tasks, or special missions, you may entrust them all to me. Currently, Belfast is in dry dock getting a retrofit. She will be ready to launch soon! #AzurLane# #Yostar# #Retrofit# #AzurLane8thAnniv#

NEW STARTUP: Retrofit your construction equipment to make it autonomous! Bedrock Robotics @BedrockRobotics is a 2024 San Francisco startup, founded by former Waymo engineers (CEO Boris Sofman, ex-head of Waymo's trucking program), that retrofits autonomy onto existing construction machines rather than building new ones. Its product, the Bedrock Operator, is a kit of lidar, GPS, motion sensors, cameras and onboard computers with AI software that mounts to a machine in a few hours with no permanent modification, letting excavators, bulldozers, loaders, graders and compactors navigate and do earthmoving work on jobsites without a human in the cab. It is deployed with US general contractors (a named customer is Champion Site Prep in central Texas), and in 2026 it raised a $270M Series B co-led by CapitalG and the Valor Atreides AI Fund at a $1.75B valuation (over $350M total), targeting its first fully operator-out excavator deployments later in the year. I find it interesting that the retrofit approach introduced by self-driving found its product-market fit in construction. Bedrock was founded in 2024 by ex-Waymo engineers (Sofman ran Waymo's trucking program, and recent hires include a head of people from Waymo and a head of evaluation from Meta AI safety), and it points the same perception-and-planning stack at construction. Sites are private, geofenced, low-speed and pedestrian-free, with a far lower safety and regulatory bar than public roads and an immediate customer ROI. The goal here is the operator-less excavator, because a dozer drives but an excavator manipulates. Graders, compactors and dozers mostly move in patterns, close to the lane-following the AV founders already mastered. An excavator digs, swings and dumps with a multi-DOF hydraulic arm on unstructured soil, which is articulated manipulation, not locomotion. Bedrock explicitly calls excavators "complex, articulated machines" and targets its first fully operator-out excavator deployment in 2026, the hard frontier of the category. The Bedrock Operator mounts in a few hours with no permanent modification to a machine the contractor already owns, so there is no warranty risk, no fleet replacement, and it can be removed. Heavy equipment lasts fifteen to twenty years, so building autonomy into new machines leaves the existing fleet untouched for a decade; a removable kit captures that installed base today, the same moat Gravis is chasing on the other continent. A $1.75B valuation on a company targeting its first operator-less deployment is AI-frontier pricing, and the backers are AI and growth money (CapitalG / Google, NVIDIA, 8VC, Eclipse, a Valor "AI Fund") plus, tellingly, Tishman Speyer, a giant real-estate developer, and MIT. The developer money is customer-adjacent, a signal of pull from the people who actually build, while the named live customer (Champion Site Prep, central Texas) grounds it in real jobsite deployment rather than a demo.

[Dynamic Preview: Belfast (Retrofit)] Be it efficiency or elegance, I promise not to disappoint you. *Content is in development and may not reflect the final version. #AzurLane# #Yostar# #AzurLane8thAnniv#

.@travisk says the biggest bottleneck to scaling Atoms is physically retrofitting decades-old mining equipment. "Let's say, we want to get a bunch of machines that are in the Amazon up and running. I've got to ship a bunch of sensors, a bunch of compute, and a bunch of equipment and mechanical systems so that a team can then go install it." "But this is a new place. How does this machine work properly in this new place? We need to calibrate it and make sure it's safe." "There's this very regimented process to make sure everything's going exactly as planned and people are exactly where they're supposed to be because otherwise weird things happen on a mining site." "So you have to go from that to running an autonomous mining operation. It's just a very different thing."

President Trump took his first flight aboard a retrofitted Boeing 747 that will temporarily serve as Air Force One, as questions swirled over a new financial disclosure showing he earned at least $2.2 billion in 2025.

President Trump took his first flight aboard a retrofitted Boeing 747 that will temporarily serve as Air Force One, as questions swirled over a new financial disclosure showing he earned at least $2.2 billion in 2025.

Today on the blog we introduce a method to retrofit Multi-Token Prediction onto frozen production models, accelerating on-device inference without the inefficiencies of separate drafters. Learn more →