Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:00] S0: There's a dawning realization, especially in the lab, the acceleration is going so vertical that what you can do behind a keyboard with AI is going to saturate. When that happens, the next frontier is the physical world. Robotics, manufacturing, industrialization. [00:00:15] S1: Living in the future and designing it. [00:00:17] S0: There's probably more change in war than there is in consumer electronics in the next two years. We need to invest a lot more in drones than in aircraft carriers. [00:00:26] S1: Just imagine 100,000 drones coming out of China just at us. [00:00:29] S0: I do feel that we need to reindustrialize the country significantly to be safe in a military sense. I would really like to reteach ourselves how to make things at scale, how to be more independent, people that are your allies now may not be in the future. [00:00:42] S1: You work with some of the most legendary successful builders, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman. [00:00:48] S0: Sam is really good at saying, "Why not more? Why not 100X or 10,000 X? You are thinking too small." For Steve, the bar he held for the company for technical talent and for excellence was not wavering. [00:01:02] S1: What does it take to create a robot that feels human and connected? [00:01:05] S0: If you walk into a room and are robots just like, "..." It's creepy. You want these devices to be non-threatening, appear soft, reactive to you. Pixar, Disney are probably the world's best at doing this type of design work.
00:01:05 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:05] S0: If you walk into a room and are robots just like, "..." It's creepy. You want these devices to be non-threatening, appear soft, reactive to you. Pixar, Disney are probably the world's best at doing this type of design work. [00:01:18] S1: There's a meteor called memory prices that are coming for consumer hardware and robotics and physical AI. [00:01:23] S0: We're in trouble as an industry. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. [00:02:41] S1: We're going to go in a bunch of different directions. I'm going to bounce around. I want to talk about VR. So much money, so many resources, so many smart people have been working on VR for so long. Meta spent, I don't know, $10 billion. They renamed the company, Meta, to lean into VR as the future of this metaverse that we're going to be living through. Feels like a lot of people are leaning out now. It feels like Meta's stepping back. Apple's stepping back with the Vision Pro. In spite of the incredible hardware that everyone, that you built, that your team built, just ... I've got a couple of the devices, it's just like a magical experience that you've ... Unlike anything you've ever experienced. It still has not caught on. What happened? Is there still a future where VR catches on or is the future kind of AR and something else?
00:03:23 · Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:03:23] S0: I don't think I would've guessed exactly what happened here, but the way I look at it is VR helped us understand how to orient things in space relative to a simulated world and the real world and connect those two. We figured out SLAM, which was how to do positioning in space using cameras. We figured out a lot of depth applications of depth sensors. We figured out how humans perceive visual data in space and all of that actually while it's great for VR and I think VR gaming is really interesting, it is kind of a niche, but I think it's an interesting niche. What I see now is in robotics, all of these technologies are being used because you need to understand how the robot is moving through space. You need to understand how far it is from everything. You need to understand if you're wearing a VR headset and driving the robot, it's the same real technology. And so for me, I view it as a step in a long technological arc. And to be honest, as someone who's not using VR a lot right now, I'm really glad that we did it, but I don't think it ... I expected it to be big, obviously, or wouldn't have been working at Oculus. And I think maybe the social aspect of having something in front of your face is part of why it didn't take off. And I think that we learned of course with Google Glass how important that is as well. And so when we tried to make it social, it's hard to make it social when you have your face covered.
00:04:55 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:04:55] S1: That is interesting. So just like the investment and innovation that happened that went into VR has actually proven to be really useful. And so it feels like the companies that have put a lot of effort into that and money into that are ahead on the next step. So is that where you think things go? Where do you think things are going? Is it AR glasses? Is something else? What's the future of this?
00:05:15 · Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:05:15] S0: I believe in AR glasses as part of the future because I do think looking down at your phone all the time is not great for us as social creatures. So if you can maintain social connections and get information, that's where I think we're headed. Orion, the AR glasses we worked on, I worked on most recently are a bit ahead of their time because they're using waveguides and MicroLED that are not quite ready for mass production. The yields just aren't there. The cost is still high. I think that's absolutely a path that AR glasses are likely to take. And as we figure out the input to those glasses, how do you communicate with them when you're on the move, when you're in public? How do you communicate quietly, silently with them? I think once we start to figure out some of those challenges that having a display that's mostly off that you can turn on when you want it to be on seems like part of the future. So that's part of it. The other part is there's this lineage of technology going through VR and then AR and now in, I'm using the term robotics, physical AI, but you really have to step back and look at autonomous vehicles, drones, obviously robots, autonomy period, manufacturing. All of these technologies are going to need the same piece parts, the same pieces that we built in the AR/VR spectrum.
00:06:36 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:06:36] S1: It's interesting with VR. There's this idea with when you build product, there's always this question when something doesn't work. Is it just you executed it badly or the idea was just a bad idea and it's always hard to know. It feels like with the AR, it's just like so much effort was put into making it work just for a decade, many decades, and just has not worked. So it's nice that we know, okay, there's nothing we can really do right now to make this work. I completely agree with you. The issue is just like, "I don't want to sit on my couch disconnected from the world." And even if I could see people through it's just like, "Eh, I'm just going to ... I don't need this. It's not that big of a deal."