The Ledger, every show

“What I do expect is, you know, within two or three years, most likely, I think the. Majority of new car sales will transition to vehicles where people don't have to drive because once you have that choice, I have a hard time believing that people are going to …”

“Next year it'll be thousands. And then it'll kind of continue. At least 10 X growth every year for their foreseeable future.”

“I think it will be strange to move into a home or apartment in five years that doesn't have a home robot, or you won't want to without one.”

“What I see is, is really Tesla as a company who kind of pioneered the end-to-end neural network approach to self-driving, which I think is the right technical bet long-term, but they put some constraints on it.”

“With Waymo they started off in the DARPA Grand Challenge era of self-driving, which is old school, classical computer vision, classical motion planning, and they built this highly validated, robust system that's now on public roads, and it's great. But they kn…”

“I think the next hundred billion dollar company that's created, you know, in 25, 26 will be under a hundred people.”

“That statement is, is almost certainly wrong given a long enough time span.”

“If you're making a bet on the right technical approach in 20, 25, it does not involve a bunch of expensive LIDARs or exotic sensors. It involves the most commodity is sort of, you know, high volume, readily available sensors you can get, and probably just seve…”

“They will leave their academic program because they want to commercialize their research, which to me is like a huge red flag, because that means you are, you're saying, I'm not going to be flexible on how I solve the problem. I'm going to force my solution in…”

“I think even though they may be doing a lot of teleoperation and other things there, I do think that China is still years behind, behind the best US companies for self-driving.”

“We got completely decimated by GM's like lack of, you know, priority and then completely abandoning crews.”

“I think we will look back at, you know, right now is kind of like a flawed social experiment, you know, gone wrong with human driven ride share.”

“Well, look, if data was the only constraint to making a driverless car, I think there would be a lot more driverless cars out there than there are. It's a lot more than data. Like cruise is not data starved, even with, you know, hundreds of vehicles on the roa…”

“But again, like there's no parallel. They're not the same thing, like a system that's driver assistance where you have to take control. Versus one where you have cars driving around without a driver. And that really doesn't come to light until you actually try…”

“I think in the future, you know, the cost of LiDAR is coming down to the point where they basically cost the same as a camera, and so I wouldn't be surprised if in the future you see Teslas with very low-cost LiDARs, and you might see cruise vehicles with very…”

“And so you've got Tesla that maybe has a large amount of low quality data. It's just camera data from a bunch of vehicles. And then you have crews and others that have a lot of Very high resolution, high quality data from these lidars and radars and other sens…”

“And so the technical problems, the software and AI problems are no longer the biggest bottleneck. Now we're turning our attention back to manufacturing and scaling and building out charging and cleaning and maintenance infrastructure in cities.”

“I think it would be that robotics today is a completely different field in a different industry than it was five years ago. Like all of the things we thought we knew, all the businesses that were tried and failed, all of the tools that have become best practic…”

“Today you don't need a robot that's repeatable. You need a robot that's adaptable, like powered by neural networks, and if it makes a mistake or doesn't approach this object at exactly the right angle, it doesn't matter. It can correct that.”

“If you're willing to completely let go of that and embrace today's tools, it's not the programming thing. You have to show a robot how to do a task and it can mimic that and let, you know essentially chat GPT like technologies instruct these things at a high l…”

“When we go from. 80 people to 400 people, our productivity per person is going to drop by 90%. And are we going to sign up for that and understand that it won't get better until we're past 400 people? I mean, that's the reality of the situation.”

“I think my heart was in the right place, but I was naive about the ability to get like a large corporation, which is like, it's like an aircraft carrier. You can't steer it. You can't get it to change its focus. Yeah. It's going to do what it wants to do or wh…”

“To be fair, Elon nailed it from a business model perspective. He's been making billions of dollars of profit while developing self-driving cars, whereas everyone else has been burning billions of dollars to try to get to basically the same point.”

“In, in five years, maybe 10 years, It will seem as insane to have like a house without multiple home robots as it would be to have a house without a sink or like a laundry machine or like a toilet.”

“You basically have no product until it achieves superhuman safety performance. Whatever you establish that is like just slightly better than humans or 10 times better. I think most driverless cars that are on the road today fall somewhere in that category. And…”

“Too much anthropomorphism can, I see I screwed up there, can it can imply like a set of human-like behaviors that don't exist in that product. And I think Rodney Brooks wrote an essay about this basically saying with robots in particular, the appearance of the…”

“Today, 20, 25, I think it's, it would be a leap of faith for any company to sell a humanoid robot or something like that and imply that it can do all of these things. Because that's, we're still, I think many years out from that, at least from meeting those ex…”

“The only candidate today, the only companies that stand a chance are the ones where, you know, they can afford to take on that liability. Cause they're a giant tech company that makes money in other places. You know, otherwise it's very bleak.”

“First is I'm never going to sell another company again, ever. And so like, you know, maybe it will IPO or something like that, but there will never be an acquisition in my life again.”

“So the unit economics aren't great at hundreds of vehicles. They start to get pretty interesting at thousands. And then, you know, above that the advantage versus a human ride share driver is, is pretty dramatic actually.”

“Just from the first million we saw a 50% reduction in, in any kind of crash. And over a 70% reduction in the kinds of crashes that Could lead to injury.”

“With these systems, they, you know, they're already good. The ones we have today are safe, but there's no reason to me why we can't see them become 10 times better or a hundred times better than human drivers.”

“Our view is that you know, the handful of companies that you know, do this first and start these cycles of iteration and learning, Are probably going to end up with the best products. And it's likely that it becomes harder and harder to catch up as these other…”

“The first is, is that I have very little doubt that self-driving cars will be Many, many, many, many times safer than human drivers to the point where it starts to look a little reckless to let humans drive cars in places where there might be pedestrians and c…”

“I think they're Very poor tasks to start with counterintuitively. And the reason for that is laundry and dishes are things for which people are very particular about, and the cost of making a mistake is very high.”

“Because it is just intractable to maintain a three-D map of every square inch of the planet and update it in real time, and then expect that every time you go somewhere, the map is still accurate on one hand, and also probably unrealistic to assume that every …”

“Less than a hundred 95.”

“Like, I think even, even someone like Tesla may start off with like a one-to-one ratio of remote operators to vehicles.”

“I think in the home and most consumer app applications and even most industrial applications safety is still critically important, but the bar that you need to reach or the functionality that you need to re reach or the constraints you can put on the system en…”

“I think for sure, both, both in AI generally, like, you know, just pure software companies. And then also, I think the next wave is starting on, on robotics. There will be like that bubble effect.”

“Companies like Waymo are growing or are expanding, I think much more slowly than they should based on the merits and the safety of their technology.”

“If you have a couple of good engineers, they can adapt and do all those things when sitting next to an LLM and some good coding tools.”

“So for context, last year we operating tens of AVs. We're currently operating hundreds, you know, almost 400 concurrently at peak.”

“So it'll start with, you know, kind of this robo taxi market and then expand eventually into personal vehicle ownership.”

“The field has thinned down to, you know, one or two or maybe three players.”

“We have two generations of newer AV sensors and compute technology and develop in development that each one of those has a huge drop in the cost of, you know, the sensors and compute to the point where It doesn't really add that much to the cost of the vehicle…”

“Unlike a consumer device, which you can test really well behind closed doors you know, building driverless AVs is very interactive. You have all these feedback mechanisms between, you know, how AVs react with other users on the road. Training first responders …”

“The reason taxis made sense versus cars that you can go out and buy at a dealership is, you know, with the taxis, it'd be a fleet of vehicles that we would own and maintain. We could limit, you know, where they operated and they operate, they could operate, yo…”