00:22:44 · Sean O’Kane
[00:22:44] S3: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of fun ones like, you know, including some that have been reported in the run up to the release of this, like, you know, the existential risk to humanity and all that fun stuff. I think the I think the insurance one is is one of my favorites because it's just, like, one of the most over the top things to have to point out. Like, I gotta imagine the lawyers sitting in a room and being like, well, I guess we technically do need to disclose that this could run way past what the entire insurance industry is is willing to do. Instead of focusing necessarily on, like, one more specific risk factor, because I think those are pretty good examples. But one other thing I wanna point out about it is, you know you know I'm a fan of language and and words and word choice, and I thought it was really interesting. There there are two things in this document that I found really interesting. One, in the risk factor where it describes how being designated a supply chain risk by the DOD, you know, can be material to the business. Anthropic's lawyers decide to call it the Department of War, which is the sort of chosen name of the Pentagon at the moment. And that's an interesting place to go along with that idea. In contrast to that, in the definition section of the s one, they do define SI, but it is not super intelligence. It is systems integrators. Yes. So they are they are using AI throughout this document in sort of contrast to the Trump administration and reserving the term SI that the administration prefers so much these days for systems integrators. So I just thought those were two interesting choices because it's like where they think they want to be able to carry, like, a little tiny bit of favor, they'll go with what the Department of War is calling itself. And and where they don't want to, they'll stay on their ground for now.
00:24:30 · Anthony Ha
[00:24:30] S0: Yeah. I mean, obviously, making any predictions is always just an exercise in, like, making yourself look like an idiot six months from now. But I will say that I would be very, very surprised if any of the major executives are still using superintelligence as their primary term of art six months from now. I feel like we're gonna look back and go, isn't that weird that they tried to make that happen? But we'll see if I get that right. I think one other thing I wanna highlight that's not so much a singular risk factor but felt like an interesting juxtaposition and a big question for companies like Anthropic was over the weekend, Apollo, the the private equity firm, you know, their chief economist, put out a little note that basically said there's been no economic value provided by AI so far, specifically at at large corporations. Like, you take the S and P 500, you subtract, you know, the seven big tech firms, that essentially there's no sign that revenue is improving, revenue per employee is improving, and yet these companies have made major investments in AI. So there's a question of what is all of this spending actually buying? And I think you can make a very good argument that it's simply too early to see that, but I think it speaks to the fact that we're at the point where companies are gonna need to start seeing that return. And if they don't start seeing that return, I think those kind of... Like, those... The serious contracts that you're seeing reported in the s one, those could start going down. They could start going in the wrong direction if companies are not actually seeing a real payoff. But I think that's probably all the time we have to talk about Anthropic because we have two other deals we wanna get to. The first one being a startup that does self driving excavation. Is that right, Kirsten?
00:26:09 · Kirsten Korosec
[00:26:09] S1: Yeah. Yeah. So this is a company called Bedrock Robotics. They've got this really interesting pedigree of folks who come from Waymo and sort of the robotics field, and they created this... Basically, this self driving kit that can be put onto construction equipment, the excavator being, like, the really important one because it's such a highly skilled job. And they had a couple breakthroughs besides just raising 600,000,000 in new funding. They also, this same week, basically now have, like, commercial... Real commercial operations happening. And that is an important point because this company is two years old. So that's, like, really satisfying. Right? Because oftentimes, we see years of pilots and promises and MOUs and things like that. And and here we have, like, the beginning of a real business.
00:27:04 · Sean O’Kane
[00:27:04] S3: Yeah. It's like a a cliche at this point that we go to CES every year, and and John Deere is talking about... Or Caterpillar is talking about, you know, new ways to automate their heavy machinery and and so to see startups continue to come into this space. I mean, we've heard for so long. Right? Like, that autonomy was going to become a thing that was more applicable in these kinds of off road fields, like you're not having to worry about other traffic, like certainly there's safety concerns, but there are reasons why it can work here in a way that it can't elsewhere. And I think that's really interesting. Also, is just one of those companies, like you mentioned, they're only two years old. I remember when we first came across them, and we were trying to run down the story about what is this company operating in stealth. Like, we know Boris Sofman. He's a known quantity in this space. What is he up to for a guy who worked on big vehicles like Waymo and worked on small vehicles like little toy cars with... At at Anki. And it's just... It's really interesting to see them move so fast. And I think it's a testament to the the focus that I think that has cohered in Silicon Valley on the VC side. We had Aidan, Madigan, Curtis from Eclipse on stage at Disrupt just a few weeks ago. She's one of the people who led that investment into Bedrock or one of the earlier investments into Bedrock, and she is just super convicted. It was really interesting to hear her talk about sort of deploying AI like this on the edge in an area where you can't really constantly update it or tweak it and and the challenges that brings. But it just shows that, like, some of these VCs are so bought into these ideas now that they're willing to throw this much money at a company that seems to be gaining real traction.
00:28:38 · Kirsten Korosec
[00:28:38] S1: Yeah. And I will say also that we've seen attempts to apply, you know, machine learning AI to robotics in the form of agriculture that hasn't totally borne out. I mean, we... We've seen some pretty interesting acquisitions. We've also seen the downside of... You know, Sean, you've done some reporting on this on companies that made some big promises around autonomy and and tractors and things like that, applying it to farming, and and it really did not go well. Construction feels like the next hot area, and we are seeing, like, quite a bit of competition in this space. Bedrock Robotics is definitely not the only one. But the thing about, you know, construction and also, like, large industrial sectors, there's so many slices. So you can do mining within this. You can, you know, be operating in the Permian Basin, you know, self driving trucks that are off road in closed environments. And so there's, I think, a lot of opportunity for startups. They don't have to, you know, boil the ocean here. They can really focus on this very, like, very specific slices and... Of this very massive sort of industrial sector. It's a big opportunity, I think, for startups that are trying to, you know, make their way into physical AI.
00:30:00 · Anthony Ha
[00:30:00] S0: Yeah. And I think one of the other interesting points that that came up in the story as well was the fact that when we talk about automation, you know, there are areas where there's very real fears about sort of what does this mean for human jobs. But construction is an area where, at least as I understand it, in The United States, that actually sort of just interest the amount of people going into these fields is is going down. And so, in theory, I mean, there's a lot of questions here, but you can imagine that this is an area where that transition can maybe be a little bit more graceful and not involve mass unemployment. But we have one more deal to talk about, and this is an even bigger investment, more than $2,000,000,000 in a startup called Rebuild, a company that I had not heard much about before reading this story. Sean, what's Rebuild?