00:01:19 · Mario Gabriele
[00:01:19] S1: We taught machines to beat the world's best chess players long before we taught them to reliably fold a towel or carry a coffee cup. That paradox is at the heart of the robotics industry, responsible for many of its false dawns over the years. Karol Hausman believes that he's found the way forward. The CEO of Physical Intelligence has raised more than $1,000,000,000 in venture funding to build an AI brain for the real world, one that helps robots generalize accurately across different tasks and environments. He's doing so by taking a very different approach from many of his best funded competitors, focusing on gathering data from actual interactions rather than through simulations. In today's episode, Karol and I discuss lessons learned from the inner game of tennis, why reinforcement learning is making a comeback, and the challenges of creating true physical intelligence. I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist. This episode is brought to you by Brex. If you're a founder, the hardest part isn't the idea. It's scaling fast without getting buried in back office work. That's where Brex comes in. Brex is the intelligent finance platform for founders. With Brex, you get high limit corporate cards, easy banking, and high yield treasury, plus a team of AI agents that handle manual finance tasks for you. They take care of things like expenses, all according to your rules, so you can move faster while staying in full control. One in three startups in The US already runs on Brex. You can too at brex.com/mario. I'm really excited about today's sponsor, Granola.
00:03:00 · Mario Gabriele
[00:03:00] S2: Simply put, Granola is the AI notepad for people in back to back meetings. I've been using Granola for over a year now, and honestly, it's a tool that has transformed the way I work. Granola takes meeting notes for you without any intrusive bots joining your calls. You can jot down rough notes like you always do, and in the background, Granola transcribes and turns those notes into clear, useful notes when the meeting ends. You can also chat with your notes, which is one of my favorite features. If someone says something on the call that you didn't quite catch or wanna learn more about, granola can help you out. It's an amazing way to be better informed during a conversation without having to interrupt everyone else's flow. You can also have granola review all your recent conversations to pull out to dos, write a weekly recap, or surface interesting ideas you might have forgotten, another thing I love. To get started with granola, head to granola.ai/mario. And for new users, you can get three months free with the code Mario. So go to granola.ai/mario and use code Mario for three months free.
00:04:07 · Mario Gabriele
[00:04:07] S1: I'm so excited to have this conversation today. In in studying what you're building with physical intelligence, naturally, much of the conversation is around the technology. But, the more I I looked into your story and the company, it feels like what you're building is really personal and connects to some of your your background in philosophy and all these other things. So I'd love to start, you know, maybe with some of some of that first. When were your earliest memories of being excited by robots?
00:04:37 · Karol Hausman
[00:04:37] S0: Probably with watching movies as a kid. I think I was a big Star Wars fan. I was reading all the all the books, watching all the movies multiple times. And I I really love the way that robots were portrayed in that world. The diversity of them, different functionalities, the way they interacted with people, the way that there are good robots and bad robots. But I don't know if I can pinpoint a specific point. I remember just just growing up being fascinated by that concept that you can build something that is so human like. And I always thought that if you were able to do that, it would allow us to understand ourselves a little bit better. And I was fascinated by kind of the things that I think people are just fascinated as they're growing up. Asking deep questions about the nature of reality, how the brain works, what does it mean to think. And I thought that robots probably are going to have some answers to these questions because reading other kinds of books or studying philosophy didn't have good answers to these questions. Then more importantly, as I started looking into robotics and started studying it, the the first impression I had was that it was very disappointing. In that every robot you would see would or basically, it seemed like there are no intelligent robots out there and no one was working with them. Every robot you would see would be this this preprogrammed machine that just goes from a to b and does it repeatedly and has no intelligence whatsoever. So I think that was maybe the the most defining moment for me when I saw that because that was like a like a wake up call of, you know, there's so many people excited about this future that we saw in the movies, that we read about in the books, it seems like no one was working on it. You said that, you
00:06:31 · Mario Gabriele, Karol Hausman
[00:06:31] S1: know, in some ways you had... You know, that you're asking the the classic questions of every child about the nature of the universe and the human mind. I don't know if that's as universal as as you might imagine it to be. I think probably there are some kids who really become fascinated by that myth, but but maybe not all. Were your parents scientists? Were there things that they did that sort of encouraged that natural curiosity that you must have had? [00:06:54] S0: Not really. No. My dad was a mechanic... Was a mechanic, and my mom was an entrepreneur. So not really. There wasn't a lot of science at at at home. I think it was mostly coming from from watching movies and being fascinated by it. I also went to... So I come from a small town in Poland. I went to high school that had very high talent density for that for that area. And I remember that being then an environment where a lot of these questions were being asked, and it was very encouraged. So I found a group of friends that were really fascinated by similar things, and I think that's what really increased my interest in that area. This... It was just a thing that you would talk about in high school.
00:06:54 · Karol Hausman, Mario Gabriele
[00:06:54] S0: Not really. No. My dad was a mechanic... Was a mechanic, and my mom was an entrepreneur. So not really. There wasn't a lot of science at at at home. I think it was mostly coming from from watching movies and being fascinated by it. I also went to... So I come from a small town in Poland. I went to high school that had very high talent density for that for that area. And I remember that being then an environment where a lot of these questions were being asked, and it was very encouraged. So I found a group of friends that were really fascinated by similar things, and I think that's what really increased my interest in that area. This... It was just a thing that you would talk about in high school. [00:07:40] S1: You had a tweet that I I saw where you were talking about Fei Fei Li's biography and how it sort of spoke to you in some sense that, you know, the immigration story and also the fact of, you know, having teachers that believed in you along the way were were sort of parallels to your own life. In high school, was that when you sort of had that first batch of those teachers who maybe saw some of that, you know, really remarkable early talent?