Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:33:25 · Boris Sofman, Alexa von Tobel
And safety is a huge one where not just the people safety, which is again, the most dangerous profession in the entire country, but the amount of secondary damage around hitting fire hydrants, damaging a truck, damaging the machine itself, preventable kind of wear on the machine, all of this improves. And now this, the every machine that has a spotter behind it, all this kind of disappears. So you start to have all of these like layers of benefit where, and then when you now put all these together as an operator, it sounds a lot like trucking where you can now move these machines anywhere you want, start a project 200 miles away the the next day. It rethink... You rethink the entire physics of the whole business. [00:34:07] S1: Okay. So Boris, now I wanna get your head up and think about the entire category, which is really the intersection of AI and robotics over the next decade. You have spent... And by the way, you have such dad points. I'm like, I just like sitting here reflecting your kids, then you're so cool. If we look out the next decade, what are some of the big predictions you have? Give us Give us just some of your very clear predictions that you have for the whole category.
00:34:35 · Boris Sofman
[00:34:35] S0: Yeah. So I think physical AI is going to be, in my opinion, the biggest theme of the next ten, fifteen years. We've seen the transformation on the digital side, astronomical, everything that Anthropic, OpenAI, everybody's doing. At the end of the day, 80% of the world's economy is still physical industries. It's industrial, it's construction, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, logistics. So I think we're just scratching the surface in this. We've seen the beginnings of it in transportation with Waymo, and it's literally just the beginnings. It's trivial percentage of the... There's 3,000,000,000,000 miles of driving per year in The US. Waymo has done cumulatively 200,000,000 in the entire history of the company. So it's clearly in the beginning of this astronomical ramp. We're pushing in as significant of an industry in these kind of the heavy machinery and construction and related industries. I think manufacturing is another astronomical one where like these are like 10% plus of GDP industries that all have like such a transformative ability to kind of reshape the way they work. And so I generally do think that the theme of the next ten years will be bringing AI into physical form. The way that happens though is not gonna look like OpenAI and Claude. You're not gonna have this like single model that solves everything because that was able to bootstrap off of this infinite amount of data that was publicly available on the internet. Here you have way more differentiation in the platforms and the sensors, and you have very complicated safety risks. And so you're gonna see more vertical integration like what we're doing in construction, what Waymo is doing in transportation, but the businesses can be trillion dollar businesses because of how big these sectors are.
00:36:18 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:36:18] S1: Not only do I agree with you, be back to companies, one called Bright AI, which is physical sensors for very specific categories, and Treeswift, which is physical robotics for trees and for overseeing forests. And so I I deeply agree with you, which is it's not a one size cuts all LLM that can solve, you know, millions of use cases. You actually need the datasets and to to go... And and and you're really building a very, very unique dataset that will be powerful here. Talk a little bit about, like, a contrarian view that you have. Like, what's an opinion that you have that maybe others don't have given your perch?
00:36:59 · Boris Sofman, Alexa von Tobel
[00:36:59] S0: Yeah. I'm pessimistic about this wave of humanoids. I think that this is technology that could be much further away than people think because there's still pretty massive advances that need to happen in tactile sensing and simulation. And particularly when you look at sectors like the consumer market where you have very high quality bars that people expect, price point pressures that are like extreme, you have so much combinations of technology risk and then product and market risk that I'm personally... I can understand the excitement about it, but the idea that there'll be this like universal kind of platform that kind of solves everything. In my mind, I think this could be almost like a .com style situation where it's not wrong, it's just off by a big period of time and there's like big advances that need to happen and it comes back and these things start to happen much later than people think. But the solutions that are actually much more practical are more surgically focused solutions that can provide really deep value focused on a particular application in industry. And so I am much less optimistic about that as a category of robotics immediately today as a practical kind of like, you know, near term business case. [00:38:18] S1: Do you mean humanoids in warehouses or humanoids in homes or all humanoids?
00:38:18 · Alexa von Tobel, Boris Sofman
[00:38:18] S1: Do you mean humanoids in warehouses or humanoids in homes or all humanoids? [00:38:25] S0: I say particularly in like homes and the idea of a 100% generalized solutions, I'm more optimistic of the idea of manipulation in fulfillment and a warehouse and assembly and manufacturing, where you customize it for the particular application you have, and you don't necessarily need to mimic the form factor of a human, you solve the problem with these technologies and eventually grow into something more generalizable. [00:38:47] S1: We share that opinion. Boris, last question before we move to the quick fire round where I just get some of your hot takes. What are you most excited about? One question, what are you most excited about?
00:38:47 · Alexa von Tobel, Boris Sofman
[00:38:47] S1: We share that opinion. Boris, last question before we move to the quick fire round where I just get some of your hot takes. What are you most excited about? One question, what are you most excited about? [00:38:59] S0: I think the pace of technology progress is the fastest I've ever experienced in my lifetime. I can't wait for it to start to have an impact on some of these spaces where it takes a little longer to break through, but can completely transform our lives, particularly in medicine, genetics, personalized treatment, where so much of it has been this painful progression of almost like iterative testing that can the way we've seen this transform a lot of these like digital and, you know, kind of structured physical AI problems. I think that's going to become much more prevalent in the next ten years. I can't wait for that to happen. And that may be the most transformative impact of AI, which I think that's sort of, that's actually kind of almost necessary, because there's this unfortunate negative opinion that's forming on AI, because it feels like society isn't universally being able to benefit from it. I hope that in places like education and healthcare, that's the most transformative and universal applications of these technologies to become possible. [00:39:59] S1: I agree with you on that. Okay, quick fire round before we let you go. What's a book that you recommend everybody read? What's a book that's had an outsized impact on your life? It can be any book. It does not have to be a business book.