01:33:09 · Zach Rash, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[01:33:09] S8: So ideally, they go back to merchants. The merchants plug them in, and then they take a few hours of downtime. Right? So you run them twenty hours a day, and then maybe you have four hours of downtime to do cleaning and charging. We do work with some of our merchants to do this. We work with a bunch of kinda ghost kitchen companies that also are a great fit at actually charging these and helping us do some of the maintenance. And then some of our big retail partners, they have a bunch of space. They might have twenty four seven staffing [01:33:34] S1: Mhmm. [01:33:34] S8: In which case, we can kinda work with them to drive some incremental revenue back to their store in exchange for doing some of the fleet management. So you'll never have a 100% in any one of these categories, but the idea is to kinda work with our partners to reduce the overall cost of operating the fleet. [01:33:48] S0: What's the bottleneck to going from a thousand active robots? Sounds like this new in The UK will will increase that. But how how do you go to a million? Like, what what are the kind of things that need to happen?
01:34:00 · Zach Rash
[01:34:00] S8: Yeah. So, you know, we're gonna bring... Coco's in about 10 cities today across The US and and Europe, and next year, we should be in between 40 to 50 cities across even more continents. And, you know, the first step is regulatory. You know, you need to create new policy for this. This is the new class of of thing. It's not a vehicle. It's not a person. It's it's a robot. And so you need to define laws around how the robots operate in our cities. So you work with different either national transportation agencies or at the state level or at the city level, depending on where we're going, introduce policy, and then ramping up manufacturing of our of our new robots. So this is Coco two. It's the next gen robot that you'll start seeing rolling around the cities in the coming weeks. So we're planning on making about 20,000 of those for 2027. Mhmm. So you'll see a pretty large step up in the fleet size across a lot of new a lot of new territories, and then the path to a million feels pretty inevitable from there. Mean, I you look like, you know, a platform like DoorDash probably has 10,000,000 drivers or something like that working working on the platform in The US, and the volumes on these platforms is still growing 20 to 30% a year. So you just compound this out. I mean, look at the at the end of the next decade, right, at the end of this... In the next ten years, you're gonna have you're gonna have to have, you know, 50% of The US working population, you know, driving for these platforms. So you you need to find a way of increasing supply without getting human drivers because you're just gonna run out of people.
01:35:31 · John Coogan, Zach Rash, Jordi Hays
[01:35:31] S1: Awesome. A lot of people in tech are worried about x risk these days. Hypothetically, where's the vulnerable point if I need to disable this with, like, a five five six round? Where would I shoot it? Can't tell [01:35:45] S8: you that, though, but I [01:35:46] S1: Oh, wow. He's on the side of the robots. This guy's traitor to humanity. [01:35:51] S8: Crazy. It... What's funny is that [01:35:54] S0: You need, like, a dead man switch. Okay. Let me test it out, bro. [01:35:57] S1: Send the delivery over. Send it over. You wanna test [01:36:00] S8: it out. Japan. Sick. In Japan, you actually have to have a big red kill switch button on the robot. [01:36:05] S1: Oh, okay. [01:36:06] S8: Which I feel like would uniquely only work in Japan. [01:36:09] S0: Yeah. Because otherwise, in the back emergency. Of [01:36:12] S1: Of course. But separately, jokes aside, I I have no doubt that, that you are feeling the benefits of general model progress and AI progress. Like, just take an image, identify if there's someone there, if you can go straight on this road. All that's probably happening. But what do evals, what do benchmarks actually look like? What are you measuring, and what are you seeing in those? Like, how do you know that the latest iteration of your software, of your AI stack is actually improving the experience? It feels like we sort of feel the failure mode. Like, the hallucination is like the viral video on Instagram of the Coco robot getting stuck on the curb. But how are you measuring that? What's progress been like?
01:36:12 · John Coogan, Zach Rash, Amiram Shachar
[01:36:12] S1: Of course. But separately, jokes aside, I I have no doubt that, that you are feeling the benefits of general model progress and AI progress. Like, just take an image, identify if there's someone there, if you can go straight on this road. All that's probably happening. But what do evals, what do benchmarks actually look like? What are you measuring, and what are you seeing in those? Like, how do you know that the latest iteration of your software, of your AI stack is actually improving the experience? It feels like we sort of feel the failure mode. Like, the hallucination is like the viral video on Instagram of the Coco robot getting stuck on the curb. But how are you measuring that? What's progress been like? [01:36:56] S8: Yeah. Well, it's it's interesting because I think in robotics, [01:36:59] S9: I mean, you see a [01:36:59] S8: lot of demos of folding clothes. And then in the self driving car world, you have a lot of road driving. Right? Yeah. In a very rule based environment. Yeah. The interesting thing about city sidewalks is they're the most complex, Yeah. Dynamic not rule based environment in the world, and every city is different. [01:37:15] S1: Yeah.
01:37:15 · John Coogan, Zach Rash
[01:37:15] S1: Yeah. [01:37:16] S8: Right? Navigating Downtown LA is is is is unique and different than Chicago, which is very different than Finland, which is very different than parts of Asia. And so you have different kind of social norms and behaviors. And so the robot actually needs to learn how to be a great, you know, user of the shared space with the public. It has to be a great sidewalk user. But we also need to get from point a to point b very quickly. So we can't spend a lot of time stopping. So there's this really complex kind of social navigational problem that we have to get very good at. So I think we have, you know, we have millions of hours and millions of miles of driving in these sort of environments, you know, snows, sun, you know, weekend nightlife, all these different sorts of environments. So we probably have one of the largest datasets of this sort of data, and and that's used to train all of our models. But then we've actually open sourced and published some really interesting benchmarks, because I think as these models progress, I think some of these big labs might want to be testing, hey, how did their model actually do at navigating the the public realm? How do we actually do it navigating, you know, a Downtown Chicago sidewalk? Yeah. And we actually have some benchmarks we've created from these different environments that we've published, and I think that will be helpful to the robotics industry in general. [01:38:31] S1: Very cool. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Jordi, sorry. Do you have any
01:38:31 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Zach Rash
[01:38:31] S1: Very cool. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Jordi, sorry. Do you have any [01:38:35] S0: Yeah. Excited to see more of these around. It's it's an interesting thing. Like, you got it... You wanna... As a business, you wanna scale quickly. But I think, like, the the lesson from flock is that, like, individual consumers have so much power Sure. Over over, like what's allowed Yeah. To operate in their area. And I think that, making sure that, you know, friendly robots are are never annoying is has to be like number one priority. And and that's such a hard problem versus what you were talking about with like on the roads. It's like we have established laws. When the light's green, go. Yeah. Oftentimes, if I'm behind John, I have to honk after the light goes green. It's not getting any greener, buddy. But anyways, very difficult problem. And, yeah, I wanna see the Coco robot in Japan. I promise not to touch the big red button. [01:39:24] S1: Yeah. I I can I can be trusted? I imagine you hiring a couple of these just to patrol the property. This feels like an intermediary. If you if you don't wanna go robot dog patrol and humanoids aren't working yet, just having a a fleet of Coco's circling the property at all times, that's security. I like it. [01:39:42] S8: Guys, how do we get some lunch orders going to the office, going to the studio? [01:39:45] S1: Well, we'll coordinate. Nick will text you right now. We'll figure it out. [01:39:48] S0: We'll Yeah. We'll do it.