Nick Halton, born Nicolas Philippe, is a nineteen year old self-taught engineer from Alsace in the east of France. He grew up in competitive swimming for twelve years, starting at age six. Early mornings, cold water, the kind of routine that wires discipline into your nervous system before you even understand what discipline means.
He wrote his first line of code at sixteen. No teacher, no bootcamp, no engineering school. Python, then JavaScript, then cold calling businesses in his town to sell them websites while still in high school. At seventeen he launched a beauty brand that hit 12,000 TikTok followers in fifteen days. He built an autonomous AI agent capable of seeing and controlling a Mac like a human. He entered his first hackathon and took first place out of 150 participants.
Today he runs 20n Research Laboratory in Paris, where he is building a universal brain for robots: a single architecture grounded in theoretical neuroscience that can control any body without training. He is nineteen, self-taught, and going all in.
Most robotics labs train one model per task, burn millions of GPU hours, and still produce controllers that break the moment something unexpected happens. 20n takes a different route. One brain, inspired by how biological nervous systems actually work, that adapts to any robot body in real time. No training phase, no cloud, no reward function. It runs at 1 kHz on a laptop CPU drawing 20 watts, and it has already been validated on three different morphologies in simulation. The science comes from Karl Friston's Active Inference and Liquid Neural Networks developed at MIT.
A single AI architecture that can control any robot body without training. Runs on a laptop CPU at 20 watts. Three simulated morphologies, zero retraining. Backed by conversations with J12 Ventures, Plug and Play, and MIT researchers.
Won first place at Innov Hack Paris among 150 participants. First hackathon ever. Went home and shipped the full iOS app in seven days. The idea: you bet real money on your goals, and if you fail, you pay. Built in Swift and SwiftUI from scratch, having never touched the language before.
An AI that could see a Mac screen and operate it like a human. No API shortcuts, no cloud, everything on device. It opened apps, wrote emails, built presentations, and switched between tools on its own. The project that proved a brain could perceive and act on an environment in real time, and the direct ancestor of 20n.
Built during Hack'Europe at Paris Saclay, one of Europe's largest student hackathons. Wattless tracked GPU spending and carbon emissions across cloud providers. Eve sat on top of it: describe the AI model you want in plain English, and she handles the rest, from code generation to deployment to monitoring. I handled the frontend and backend together with William Miserolle.
A chewing gum that takes care of your skin. Built the brand, sourced suppliers, designed packaging, launched e-commerce, and ran the TikTok from zero to 12,000 followers in fifteen days. No paid ads, no agency, no technical skills involved. Pure business from scratch.
First real business. At sixteen, cold calling local shops in Alsace to sell them websites. Learned to prospect, negotiate, design, build, and deliver, all while still in high school.
Twelve years in the pool since age six. Early mornings, cold water, and the discipline that comes from showing up every single day.
Picked up programming during Covid at fourteen. Locked in a room with a laptop, taught himself Python by building trading bots. The kind of obsession that never went away.
Left school to go all in on research. No degree, no backup plan. Just a conviction that the work mattered more than the diploma.
I dropped out at nineteen to work on 20n full time. I spend my days building a brain architecture for robots and I enter every hackathon I can find. The rest, I figure out as it comes.
I taught myself everything. I built things nobody asked me to build. I failed at some and shipped others. I am nineteen and I know exactly what I want to spend the rest of my life working on.
Whether you are an investor, a researcher, a fellow builder, or just someone who thinks this is interesting. I always reply.
nick0@20n.dev