01:00:18 · John Coogan, Bernt Øivind Børnich, Jordi Hays
[01:00:18] S1: Sure. [01:00:18] S5: Huge role models based on this, and it just works on a robot. And that's what the VODEX role model lab is about. So to enable that general intelligence for robotics, you need to design the robot so that it interacts with the world exactly like a human. And then you wanna do that with the least amount of complexity possible, and that's essentially what we have here. But of course, the complexity of that is pretty high because you're you're mimicking a human head. [01:00:37] S1: Let's talk about grip strength. We got grip strength testers here in the studio. Is this an important benchmark? Clicking these together, how strong is the hand currently? Where do you wanna go? Because it feels like there's a trade off there where if the hand like, the stronger you make the hand, the heavier, the more, the more dangerous it could potentially be. At the same time, there's certain tasks that you expect a certain level of grip strength. [01:01:02] S0: Also yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it'd be interesting to understand how often tasks come up in your daily life where you need, like, insane grip strength. [01:01:11] S1: Yeah. Right? It's pretty rare, I think. But certainly in, you know, industrial capacity or even around the home, picking things up, moving a chair, you need to be able to grab it without dropping it. It's a safety issue at the end of the day.
01:01:11 · John Coogan, Bernt Øivind Børnich
[01:01:11] S1: Yeah. Right? It's pretty rare, I think. But certainly in, you know, industrial capacity or even around the home, picking things up, moving a chair, you need to be able to grab it without dropping it. It's a safety issue at the end of the day. [01:01:24] S5: Yeah. I think it it actually appears quite often, but you don't think that much about it because you don't do it for a long period. Like Yeah. Yeah. You're not grasping that hard, but then something starts slipping and you tighten your grip more like it, you're actually using quite a bit of force. So the hand is roughly the same. Yeah. That's a good one. The hand is roughly the same strength as an average human. Really? So and that's so, I mean, it needs to be able to do the full capabilities of a robot, right? So the robot can deadlift 150 pounds. [01:01:51] S1: Yeah. So the [01:01:51] S5: hands need to hold the bar of 150 pounds. Yeah. Not because deadlifting is useful in everyday life, but because it's a good metric for like how capable we are. [01:01:59] S1: Yeah.
01:01:59 · John Coogan, Bernt Øivind Børnich
[01:01:59] S1: Yeah. [01:01:59] S5: So we really worked hard to make that kind of power to weight ratio also about the same as human. Mhmm. So if you look at the general hands in the market right now, this thing is roughly three times, as high force as the other hands. Yep. That is really also something that's going to enable a lot of new applications. Because in the end, your AI will be as smart as the diversity of the experiences that you have lived and experienced. Diversity of data is directly correlated with the intelligence of your model. And if you are as a third as strong as a human in your hands, there's a lot of tasks you just can't do. [01:02:35] S1: Yeah. I have one more. It feels like you have jumped to the frontier of hands specifically. Is, as I saw people joking, can I just buy the hand? Obviously, they're making probably rude jokes. But, is there a world where you partner with other robotics companies to sell a piece of your hardware, maybe just the hand to someone else that already has a wheeled robot, but it needs a hand? Is there a world where you're selling parts of your technology, or do you wanna be vertically integrated from end to end the full experience?
01:02:35 · John Coogan, Bernt Øivind Børnich, Jordi Hays
[01:02:35] S1: Yeah. I have one more. It feels like you have jumped to the frontier of hands specifically. Is, as I saw people joking, can I just buy the hand? Obviously, they're making probably rude jokes. But, is there a world where you partner with other robotics companies to sell a piece of your hardware, maybe just the hand to someone else that already has a wheeled robot, but it needs a hand? Is there a world where you're selling parts of your technology, or do you wanna be vertically integrated from end to end the full experience? [01:03:10] S5: I think there there is a world like this. Mhmm. I do think it's very important though that we wanna we're we're about to also launch Neo as a platform where we we're gonna invite everyone in to build on this. Mhmm. And having a homogeneous platform that everyone is building on is so incredibly powerful because that doesn't exist today, and that really allows you to do benchmarks across systems like you have in the rest of the AI community. But that being said, it's not a hill we're going to die on. If the collaborations are the right types of collaborations, we just want to make sure we can scale our manufacturing and get as many out there as possible and build the ecosystem and really give robotics all the love it deserves. Right? [01:03:48] S1: Yeah. Totally. We just [01:03:49] S5: wanna accelerate the path. [01:03:50] S0: Yeah. Amazing. Timeline around shipping. What what's what's the what's the update there? I know a bunch of people that are that are in line that have that have ordered. So everyone's So,
01:03:50 · Jordi Hays, Bernt Øivind Børnich
[01:03:50] S0: Yeah. Amazing. Timeline around shipping. What what's what's the what's the update there? I know a bunch of people that are that are in line that have that have ordered. So everyone's So, [01:04:03] S5: yeah. I'll be kind to my team and not give you a specific date. But we have promised that we are going to ship this year, and we will ship this year. [01:04:09] S0: So we're [01:04:09] S5: gonna keep that promise, and it's gonna be incredibly exciting. And like I said, like, the reason we can be so open, right, so you can just read into that. Like I said, the reason we can be so open is that this is about to ship. So people will pick it apart anyway. That's fair. And I do think this is gonna be so big. Right? Like, as AI now becomes physical, it's really hard to understand what kind of impact that will have. We're getting so much interest from, let's say, wet labs that want to have their AI for science actually design, manufacture, and run their experiments. There's hospitality, elderly care, you have the home that we're already working towards. Like, there's this enormous surface area and, it's gonna happen a lot sooner than people think. And I think, right now it's just about really growing the pie and making sure that everyone has, platforms that they can work on to to solve these hard problems. [01:05:01] S0: Yeah. Amazing.
01:05:01 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Bernt Øivind Børnich
[01:05:01] S0: Yeah. Amazing. [01:05:03] S1: How will I mean, the last question I have is, like, like, this this feels like a technology that even after you solve development, design, and the the the AI that powers all of this, like, it is much more gated by the real world, and thus, we would see, like, a slower takeoff. Like, what we've seen with Waymo, it's it's, you know, everywhere in San Francisco. But as you go around the world, you don't realize that cars can drive themselves. Whereas, you know, chattybt.com was available in every country, and it was just like the touring test is passed for everyone at the exact same time. And that's that feels impossible in robotics in the physical world. But do you have a different view of it, or am I roughly correct with that prediction? [01:05:50] S5: The ramp is gonna be slower, but the total uptake is gonna be way, way, way higher. [01:05:54] S1: Sure. [01:05:55] S5: Right? So, like, if you think about and I'm I'm very bullish on this. Like, I think it's just a couple of two to three years away. Wow. But even if it's a decade away, like, robots will build robots. Yeah. And we're already working on this in a factory. But they won't just build the robots. They'll build the data centers, the chip fab, the energy infrastructure, infrastructure, get get into into mining mining and refining. [01:06:12] S1: Yeah.