Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:13:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:13:34] S1: So one of the most interesting lines of development is these humanoid robots, that's kind of like our meat brains are always more attracted to robots that look like us and act like us. There's a few companies very ahead. There's Optimus, Tesla, there's Figure, there's NEO, there's a few others. What's your sense on just the current state of these humanoids and kind of where ... I don't know, how close are we to humanoids being around us? [00:13:58] S0: We might be close. I have, like many others, safety concerns about large, strong humanoids operating right next to people because we have to have enough data to show that that's safe. There are some designs and 1X NEO is a good example of this that have made significant safety considerations in their designs and pulled mass inwards essentially, which is a lot safer. Softer robots is safer. [00:14:25] S1: Just to clarify, you're saying they're lighter and so the impact of a robot hitting you is less.
00:14:25 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:14:25] S1: Just to clarify, you're saying they're lighter and so the impact of a robot hitting you is less. [00:14:30] S0: Yeah. The part that might hit you, which in this case might be the arm, if it's lighter and softer ... There's two aspects, you have the arm moving through space and then you have the actuator that's rotating so you have to add up the energy essentially for both of those things. And so that's an impact thing that you have to worry about. Then you have to worry about the compliance of the arm. If it's just hard, then the impulse is high, but if it's soft and compressible, then the impulse is lower. And so you really have to be thinking about this when you have robots around people. So in my world, in my worldview, the humanoid robots are still prototypes and they're advanced prototypes. What we need to do is show that this works at all, which is kind of where we're at right now. Once we have working prototypes, then usually, at least in my field, what you do is you continue to revise them to make them cheaper, easier to manufacture, higher yield and safer. And I think this is what's going to happen next. In my mind, they're not quite ready yet. Now you can get a Chinese robot that can do all kinds of things for you, but if you look at the booklet, it says, "Hey, no human can be within three feet of this robot." And you're not going to see very many robots that are strong enough to do meaningful work that don't have that warning right now.
00:15:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:15:59] S1: That is so interesting. It's funny to hear that at the same time there's these nunchuck wielding robots in China doing dances with other folks. I've never thought about just that part of it, the impact they can have if they go awry. I want to come back to that, but just like timeline wise, what's your sense realistically when humanoid robots are walking around the streets in people's homes at scale? [00:16:22] S0: At scale is the problem in my mind. At scale is a huge challenge. Now for me, my background at scale means millions usually, but let's even say hundreds of thousands. You've got to get a good design that's running. Then you've got to make it reliable enough that it can keep running day to day to day without a lot of human intervention or repair and that's its own problem. But the first problem you have is supply chain and this is going to be something that I hope that we can talk about a little bit more, but every single part that goes into that robot's coming from somewhere and many of these parts may become more restricted or difficult to make and it may be harder to assemble the subassemblies and the meaningful parts of the robot here in this country. So there's a very complex supply chain dependency right now on robots like humanoids, but also other robots that we have to figure out. And a lot of people are trying to move production here to the United States, which is very challenging because we don't have great actuator companies here yet, for example.
00:16:22 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:16:22] S0: At scale is the problem in my mind. At scale is a huge challenge. Now for me, my background at scale means millions usually, but let's even say hundreds of thousands. You've got to get a good design that's running. Then you've got to make it reliable enough that it can keep running day to day to day without a lot of human intervention or repair and that's its own problem. But the first problem you have is supply chain and this is going to be something that I hope that we can talk about a little bit more, but every single part that goes into that robot's coming from somewhere and many of these parts may become more restricted or difficult to make and it may be harder to assemble the subassemblies and the meaningful parts of the robot here in this country. So there's a very complex supply chain dependency right now on robots like humanoids, but also other robots that we have to figure out. And a lot of people are trying to move production here to the United States, which is very challenging because we don't have great actuator companies here yet, for example. [00:17:32] S1: And the actuator is the little arm, I don't know ... How would you describe an actuator to a non-robotics person? [00:17:37] S0: Yeah, the actuator is the motor. So you put power into it, electricity into it, and you get motion out of it. [00:17:38] S1: Cool. [00:17:44] S0: And most of these robots have a rotating rotor essentially that then has gearing on it that then powers the limb or powers the head or the fingers or whatever else. So they could be small, they could be large.
00:17:44 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:17:44] S0: And most of these robots have a rotating rotor essentially that then has gearing on it that then powers the limb or powers the head or the fingers or whatever else. So they could be small, they could be large. [00:17:58] S1: Okay, awesome. I hear the word a lot and I'm like, " I don't know exactly what it means." So thank you for explaining it. I want to talk about the supply chain stuff more because I know you think a lot about this,- what's the state of the union on the supply chain for say robotics? What's going on? What are the pieces? What are the challenges?
00:17:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:17:58] S1: Okay, awesome. I hear the word a lot and I'm like, " I don't know exactly what it means." So thank you for explaining it. I want to talk about the supply chain stuff more because I know you think a lot about this,- what's the state of the union on the supply chain for say robotics? What's going on? What are the pieces? What are the challenges? [00:18:13] S0: So the way to think about it is you can start with raw materials and magnets is a good place to start. So we need to be able to get the magnets, the raw magnets, for example. Then we need to be able to process them, then we need to be able to integrate them into actuators and build the actuators around them. Then we need to be able to integrate those actuators into subcomponents or robots themselves. And each layer of this chain has essentially been outsourced over the last 25 years to countries like China, like Japan, like Korea. And full transparency, I've been part of that transfer of engineering knowledge to Asia. In Asia, the expertise has historically been scale and being able to build a lot of these parts at lower prices. We've had this kind of deal across these borders that this is how we're going to operate for the most part. Now, of course, there's things we make in this country still and of course there's design and AI that's made in Asia, but that's essentially where things have been for a long time. And in order to have a safe supply chain, we need to start to work on having some independence in these layers and these stacks.