Tyrell Asimov Teases “Super Intelligent Dog” After Viral Ollie Robotics Project
SAN FRANCISCO — October 14, 2026 — After drawing attention for Ollie, his embodied robotics project built around the behavioral history of a specific cat, Tyrell says he is now preparing to reveal a second platform: a Super Intelligent Dog based on his sister’s late Shiba Inu.
Tyrell Asimov, ex Xbox engineer, who has been documenting the project on X at @TAsimovF, says the dog system began as an experiment months before Ollie was fully completed.
At the time, the Shiba was still alive. During the final stages of the Ollie project, however, the dog became ill and later died. That loss changed the direction of the project.
Instead of building a generic robotic dog, Tyrell began using years of his sister’s old phone videos as behavioral reference material.
The footage included walking patterns, ear movement, head orientation, response delays, reactions to familiar voices, approach behavior, tail position, and the Shiba’s tendency to sometimes ignore commands entirely.
According to Tyrell, those patterns are now used to influence how the robotic system responds.
A DIFFERENT MACHINE THAN OLLIE
Although both Ollie and the new dog platform are quadrupeds, Tyrell says very little of the physical design could simply be copied.
The canine platform required a longer internal frame, different shoulder and hip geometry, more powerful actuators, compliant feet, and a new gait controller built around the higher center of mass and different weight transfer of a Shiba Inu.
Sensors monitor joint position, motor current, body orientation, and foot contact so the robot can continuously correct its movement rather than simply replaying fixed animations.
The system also uses cameras, microphones, speaker recognition, spatial audio, persistent memory, and local perception software.
HOW GROK FITS INTO THE SYSTEM
Tyrell Asimov says Grok is used as a high-level reasoning layer, not as a direct motor controller.
The local robotics stack handles balance, joint control, locomotion, safety limits, and real-time sensor feedback.
Grok instead receives a structured description of the current situation — such as who is nearby, whether the voice is familiar, what happened recently, and where the person is located — and selects from a restricted set of behaviors.
Those behaviors can include orienting toward someone, approaching, following, waiting, resting, or ignoring a stimulus.
The physical movement is still generated and controlled locally.
MAKING THE ROBOT LESS PERFECT
One of the main lessons carried over from Ollie was that perfectly smooth behavior often looks less realistic.
The dog system intentionally varies response timing, stride length, head turns, ear movement, and hesitation within safe limits.
Sometimes the dog may respond immediately.
Sometimes an ear moves first.
Sometimes it turns its head but stays seated.
And sometimes it may not respond at all.
Tyrell says that variability is based on patterns found in the original Shiba’s footage.
FULL REVEAL STILL TO COME
The completed Super Intelligent Dog has not yet received a full public reveal.
Tyrell has shared technical details and development updates, but has so far held back the finished system itself.
Recent tests, he says, have reached the point where vision, audio, memory, Grok-based reasoning, behavior selection, and locomotion are all operating together.
After Ollie became the first Super Intelligence Cat in Tyrell’s project, the Shiba platform is intended to test whether the same embodied-intelligence architecture can be transferred successfully to an entirely different animal.
Tyrell says the first full look is coming soon.
Follow the project on X: @TAsimovF
