The Ledger, every show

“If you have a machine that is a multitask machine and can do lots of small things that you would maybe even pay zero dollars for if it was a standalone machine, but when it's bundled into this general purpose machine that can you know, pick up all the kids toy…”

“To get a machine that thinks in this very rigid world to work with such malleable items has been like this tough research problem for a long time for anyone to be able to go buy a thing, put it in their home and without any other instruction than like my cloth…”

“The bar for commercial success for self-driving was like five, six nines of reliability. And understand that each extra nine of reliability you add, so 10 times better, takes probably 10 times more engineering work.”

“Even as an industry, if the robotics industry sets the expectations too high on a whole for what the next generation of robots will do, everyone's going to be disappointed. And I think it's without a doubt will happen in robotics and not because of any one bad…”

“The problem comes in when you have a business that is premised on or conditioned upon commercializing today's frontier of technology, because that will just take time. And we don't know if that's like one year or 10 years.”

“Notably the companies who were making these investments were not startups that were just doing this by raising venture capital around. They were large corporations with R and D budgets or basically the pockets that were deep enough to make Strategic long-term …”

“The numbers coming out around large language models on the frontier, though, are getting up into that territory.”

“And they had this big hole in their unit economics, which is paying the drivers. And so suddenly there was like a strong market pull for self-driving technology, whereas before I had been seen as just kind of a cool sci-fi thing.”

“I think the missing piece, maybe Starlink or something similar where you can have always on connectivity between Starlink and maybe a cell phone and some other fallback. I think that really opens up the opportunity in the number of places you can deploy robota…”

“Once you get to like, you know, 50% remote assistance or even 25% at 25% remote assistance, you've already reduced the labor costs, you know, 75%. And so you're almost already at the diminishing returns point.”

“Using classical approaches, Where you have computer vision and you're trying to like reconstruct three D objects or fit to a map would make this like a really, really challenging and computationally intensive problem. Moving to more modern techniques like end …”

“One thing I saw in self-driving, which I guess you could say it's intuitive, but it was still very striking, was that most people on the whole were very skeptical of self-driving cars. I guess like, 75, 80% of people are like, I've never, you know, I'm never g…”

“Public perception will always lag the true state of this technology because it's moving so fast by the time, you know, people develop a consensus opinion, it's already out of date.”

“You take a system that's designed to operate safely in San Francisco and put it in Austin or Phoenix and it performs extremely well.”

“Yeah, we're not done. There'll be more this year. And you know, that that's because next year we're going to be manufacturing a lot of vehicles and you know, that's our biggest limitation to scale right now.”

“When you're driving at speed, this system literally has About the blink of an eye, a couple hundred milliseconds to process all that sensor data, this complex AI problem, make sense of it all, and then send a signal to the vehicle. And so that real time piece …”

“The vehicle we're building called the Origin is designed to last one million miles, which is four or five times as long As the average car will.”

“Cruises driven 400,000 driverless miles and only there's been a few handfuls of these types of things pop up and, you know, nothing, nothing serious as when it comes to safety”

“Five to 10 hours a week people spend doing essentially unpaid, unskilled labor in their own home yet we all take that for granted and do it every day.”

“Well, where my head is drawn to is some of the toy problems in academia, like t-shirt folding, and there are robots and neural networks now that can fold t-shirts.”

“Several months ago, one of our early prototypes, we had, we would do this thing where we just like dump a basket full of kids' toys in a room and say, hey, robot, clean this up. There's like, 49 toys on the ground, and over the course of like 30 minutes, it to…”

“I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to raise money. I think I pitched like A 120 investors you know, over the course of probably a couple of years to raise all the money we needed.”

“Well, you know, it takes about four years to you know, go through the automotive development cycle. And so what you see on the road with cruise robotaxis was four years ago, technology, the stuff we're developing now you know, is a lot more sleek and integrate…”

“No, we'll probably start off in, in you know, a few neighborhoods and then ramp up over time. Our vehicles won't be on the highway right now, which I think is good.”

“There was a, there's an infamous mailing list, email mailing list at MIT called the jobs list that was run by a faculty member in the computer science department. And it ended up being a place where Harvard and Yale business school students would basically sen…”

“I mean, it ended up being a backpack that had all this equipment, you know, a video encoder that would encode a video stream. And digitize it. And then some software that ran, ran on a small Linux computer that would take that video stream and dynamically allo…”

“We went from, you know, nothing to a working prototype that could drive from San Francisco to Palo Alto, you know, the highway stretch of that in about three months, you know, just with a scrappy team working in a garage.”

“Our first time doing that was about two years ago. So I guess I'd, that'd be I think around the end of twenty-twenty... We did our first driverless drive around, you know, a quiet part of San Francisco at night with no one behind the wheel.”

“It's on the order of a hundred cars, and in the evening, they all start off in parking lots, powered off.”