00:55:15 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Eric Seufert, Sean Frank, Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:55:15] S1: Back. Always always a great time. [00:55:17] S0: My favorite my favorite conversations. When you're on, it makes me feel like we're on we're on we're actually, you know, on SportsCenter. Yeah. Because most people that have talked about this stuff are not high energy. It's just like full on sports center. It's amazing. Amazing. I love [00:55:31] S2: it. [00:55:31] S1: Well, congratulations on all the progress and and the Prosperous Society. Go listen to it. It's a three hour four part series and sign up for Mobile Dev Memo if you haven't already. Of course, you should. But thank you so much for coming on the show, Eric. We'll talk to you soon. [00:55:44] S2: Take care, guys. [00:55:45] S1: Have a good one. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And our next guest is Bert from one x. He's the founder and CEO. How are you doing? What is that? [00:55:59] S6: What is you. [00:56:00] S1: Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. That is incredible. [00:56:04] S5: My hand, and then it's like Neo's hand. [00:56:06] S1: Yes. Introduce, the launch today. What happened? Tell us about it.
00:56:06 · John Coogan, Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:56:06] S1: Yes. Introduce, the launch today. What happened? Tell us about it. [00:56:10] S5: I mean, we've been cooking on this for quite a while, so super excited to finally show this to the world. Also, it's just so exciting because we're so close to shipping now. Yeah. So everyone's going to pick this apart anyway. Yeah. So we don't need to be careful anymore and we can just open it up. To me, it's this beautiful machine that becomes almost more art than engineering, right, at this point. Yeah. We're very excited to show people what we've been cooking and excited to put it in people's hands. I think also, has it a special place in my heart because we're working on this problem for more than a decade. And one thing that Neo and One X has really been pushing is how to use highly miniaturized, high power motors and tendons to create these machines that mimic humans. The hands is the kind of culmination of all that work, right? It's where all of the complexity comes together to meet the world, hopefully we've created something here that can really remove that final barrier for how intelligent our models can become. Right? Like Mhmm. So much of human intelligence comes from our ability to to probe the world for truth and to really figure out how the world works through our hands.
00:57:21 · Jordi Hays, Bernt Øivind Børnich, John Coogan
[00:57:21] S0: Okay. Take us through the full journey of developing hands for Neo. Lot of people in tech love to, you know, follow an an Elon style playbook, just make the most simple version of something, simplify, simplify, simplify. This looks incredibly beautiful, but also incredibly complex. And so I wanna understand, like, how you how you got here basically, like, version by version. [00:57:48] S5: So it is a very complicated hand, but in my opinion, it is the simplest version of it that exists that is good enough to do what needs to happen. So first of all, Onex is fully vertically integrated, so we do absolutely everything in house and in our factory here in California where I'm sitting right now. We do everything from designing the production processes to producing our own motors, our own tendons, the entire system, right, sensors, electronics, everything in house. And that allows us to iterate very, very fast Because I do really believe in, like, you have to have this first principles approach. Right? So start with, like, what what am I trying to solve? We're quite lucky in that we have, humans to look at with respect to how do you solve this problem. Nature did a pretty good job. [00:58:33] S1: So when you say you're you're you're looking at humans, what type of training data are you using? What's useful? What are you discarding from just there's a lot of hand videos on the Internet, I'm sure. People doing all sorts of things. You can do teleoperation. You can have people wear gloves and do motion capture. You can do simulation. [00:58:51] S0: X-ray.
00:58:51 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:58:51] S0: X-ray. [00:58:52] S1: Yeah. X-ray. I mean, there's so many different ways. Like, you're using everything. Is there one, one path that you found specifically, valuable?
00:58:52 · John Coogan, Bernt Øivind Børnich
[00:58:52] S1: Yeah. X-ray. I mean, there's so many different ways. Like, you're using everything. Is there one, one path that you found specifically, valuable? [00:59:02] S5: So I think, actually, it starts from, like, starting with first principles. Right? So, Womx has always been about we want to design robots that are safe so they can live and learn among people. Mhmm. But also because safety is what allows us to learn. So we probe the world for truth and of course if our fingers break while doing that or we break whatever we're trying to touch, it doesn't work. So you need to design this beautiful kind of like compliant soft systems that force can flow both ways because you're both seeing with your hands and acting with your hands. And that's really what this is all about. So like, how do you create that? And you kind of have to look at how nature works, like our muscle, nothing really moves fast. There's no gears, no nothing like this. So we've designed this from these first principles. But we go way deeper than that. I think what we haven't talked enough about yet, and we'll share more about this later, is like how incredibly seriously we take closing the gap towards a human. And it's not to look like a human. It's because we want the work system to work like a human. So even like if you look at Neil's hand behind me here, we worked so deeply on how do you make these fingers nonlinearly just like be compliant exactly like a human finger? Because if you get all these details right, you can take all of the video that's out there on the Internet. You can train
00:59:02 · Bernt Øivind Børnich, John Coogan
[00:59:02] S5: So I think, actually, it starts from, like, starting with first principles. Right? So, Womx has always been about we want to design robots that are safe so they can live and learn among people. Mhmm. But also because safety is what allows us to learn. So we probe the world for truth and of course if our fingers break while doing that or we break whatever we're trying to touch, it doesn't work. So you need to design this beautiful kind of like compliant soft systems that force can flow both ways because you're both seeing with your hands and acting with your hands. And that's really what this is all about. So like, how do you create that? And you kind of have to look at how nature works, like our muscle, nothing really moves fast. There's no gears, no nothing like this. So we've designed this from these first principles. But we go way deeper than that. I think what we haven't talked enough about yet, and we'll share more about this later, is like how incredibly seriously we take closing the gap towards a human. And it's not to look like a human. It's because we want the work system to work like a human. So even like if you look at Neil's hand behind me here, we worked so deeply on how do you make these fingers nonlinearly just like be compliant exactly like a human finger? Because if you get all these details right, you can take all of the video that's out there on the Internet. You can train [01:00:18] S1: Sure.