Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:12:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:12:08] S1: It sounds so hard and complicated. They're just like, "Software is so nice, you just write some code, ship it. It's great." Why do you think people are getting so into robots and hardware now? What's the driving trend? [00:12:20] S0: Yeah. What I'm seeing in the AI world in San Francisco is there's a dawning realization, especially in the labs, I think that the acceleration is going so vertical that what you can do behind a keyboard with AI is going to saturate. And I don't know when it's going to saturate and nobody else knows either, but when that happens, the next frontier is the physical world. And so what I see happening is the labs, big tech, startups are all realizing at the same time, "Okay, this is coming. We're going to have complex systems that can solve problems in the digital world very, very quickly. We already have them. They're going to get better and more comprehensive and more capable." If you think about that as a frontier, you could see the end of that tunnel. Now, I don't know when it's going to be again, but we can see that that's going to saturate at some point, or at least people think it will. And when that happens, the next frontier is hardware. The next frontier is robotics, manufacturing, industrialization, the sensing layer in the real world, the ability to move objects in the real world and eventually we hope space.
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?