The Exchanges

Q And so, so, so tell us about a few of your products. What are you guys actually doing? What do you could tell me about?

A Sure. So we're doing a few things. I mean, The first product that we worked on is called a Sentry Tower. It is a Solar-powered, infrastructure-independent AI surveillance power that you can put basically anywhere, put it around a military base, a border, critical infrastructure like power plants, desalination sites, and it uses radar, thermal vision, visible spectrum imaging, and a few other sensors fed into a probability model running on a computer that allows you to detect all the people, all the vehicles, all the animals, all the drones that are a couple miles around it. And these things also mesh together, they talk to each other, so you can deploy, you know, strings of these things a couple miles apart and get really good awareness of everything that's going on Around your base, or around your airport, or around your border, whatever it is you're trying to understand.

AI assessment note: “The first product that we worked on is called a Sentry Tower.”

Q And they go like Mach five, right? Is that, is that, is this what I'm thinking of? Is a Mach five engine or how fast are they?

A Oh, that's the best part. The faster you go, the better they are, unlike most types of jet engines, because the faster you go, the more pressure they can develop and the higher your compression ratio of the engine is. So they actually start working. There are subsonic ramjets going back to World War II, but you really want to be going Mach three, four, five, six for them to really come into their own and beat other engines. And until now, there's never been really aircraft that could survive that regime of flight. And so ramjets were just inefficient. Impossible to start the support equipment required to get them into the air and going fast enough was too heavy. But very recently, I think ram jets have come back into this world where we do have composites that can handle vehicles going that fast. We have secondary propulsion systems, uh, like basically electric propulsion that allow you to do things like, uh, you, uh, I guess, a variable compressors that would allow you to use them from zero speed and then switch over to full RAM at high speed. This was actually what I was working on when I, when I was at Facebook, I had a side project. Me and a few guys were in Atherton, and we got kicked out of Atherton because we were making so much noise. But we were building a project called ASRAM, the assisted ramjet, and it was a ramjet that could take off from zero and then transition t…

AI assessment note: “you really want to be going Mach three, four, five, six”

Q How did that emerge? Was that a natural thing where a few of you on each side kind of got it and decided and made that choice? It was the personalities of the people involved, or was it actually the, the, the market forces? Like what actually brought that together?

A It was a combination. I mean, like, I think it was market driven. We weren't just doing this as like idealists who thought it was for the greater good, but like we knew that if everyone saw VR as something that made me sick or that was low quality or that was janky, that it would not be good for any of our products. And so, I mean, personality wise, like me at Oculus, like I at Oculus was a really big, you know, I pushed this really hard that we should, You'll be kind of helping other players in the industry. At Sony, I think it was, uh, Shui Yoshida-san, uh, at PlayStation, he was really big on doing the same thing. Like, we would go to trade shows, and we'd both have our closed doors demos running for investors and game developers, and we would always make sure to bring them over and show them exactly what we're doing, explain exactly why, and Talk through, talk through ideas where we could, uh, share technology. Same thing I think with Valve, a lot of the guys that were at Valve, some of who ended up later coming to Oculus, which is its own crazy dramatic story, but, uh, you know, at the time it was really clear that we were all doing it for same business reasons. We weren't, we weren't communists. They're just like, Oh man, no need to run a business. We all just need to share and share the love. We all figured we would be.

AI assessment note: “It was a combination. I mean, like, I think it was market driven.”

Q Give me some, give us some stats on ghosts. Like what, how fast does this thing go? How long does it go for?

A Uh, so cruise at about 85 miles an hour. It can fly for up to two hours on a battery and up to six and a half hours on a hydrogen fuel cell, which clips on and places the battery. Uh, the really cool thing about it is like the airframe is incredible. We can carry a ton of payload. It can fly for every long time. It's also, uh, we call it ghost because it's basically inaudible and almost invisible. Uh, at a hundred meters, it is inaudible to the human ear. And because, because it's a helicopter, it's very, very skinny and very, very short. And we stack everything all in a line. When you look at it dead on, it's like, it's like this big, like this is the front of the thing. So try looking at a square and it's like, you know, three inches tall, three inches wide, a hundred meters away. Basically invisible. And when you get a few hundred meters, like let's say 300 meters, you, you are invisible.

AI assessment note: “cruise at about 85 miles an hour. It can fly for up to two hours”

Q It's interesting though, because you, it's rather than join a big company next, You decided to start your own company, but I guess you'd be gotten big very quickly. I guess you might be able to say, so you still, you think you have those advantages again right now?

A Oh yeah. I mean, going into my, going, going into this as a, going into this as my second company, it's very different. You know, I said before that Oculus, I started it not because I thought it'd be a successful business, but because I thought it'd be important for the long run and a lot of fun to work on. Um, I had no idea it was going to be such a case of right place, right time with Anderall. It was very different. I said, this company, I am going to grow it to be large and influential very quickly. There's a huge market distortion that I can take advantage of. The companies that are doing defense work are totally incompetent when it comes to machine learning, AI, computer vision, and the companies that are good at those things refuse to work with DOD. And from the beginning, I mean, in our first pitch deck, it said, we are going to become a company that saves taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year and makes tens of billions of dollars a year. And I'd say like that, that was a big goal of the company from the start, because if we don't grow this to be a many billion dollar company, it means that we're just another lark. It means we're just another supplier into the system. We didn't actually change the way.

AI assessment note: “Oh yeah. I mean, going into this as my second company, it's very different.”

Q much more sophisticated. They can memorize paragraphs. They're these hard things we had to do. They were harder. Then they gave you more skills to do things. And it seems like nowadays we've gotten rid of the stuff that's hard in order to get there faster, but then you kind of lose some of the depth basically. Is that, is that, is that an analogy for this kind of interface?

A You're right. And I think businesses are doing what people are naturally wired to want, which is the fast reward, the thing where you don't have to put in the time where you get that quick, you know, the quick dopamine hit, not the longterm return on productivity. And so where, where this ties into neuroplasticity, I think, is that there is enormous potential for things like brain to computer interfaces or peripheral nervous system interfaces that require an enormous amount of training to be able to use. I think people are thinking about these things the wrong way. They're thinking, I want to have a brain to computer interface where I put it on my brain and without any training, I just naturally think things. I think a word and it does it, or I think something out and it types it. I think the most powerful uses of these types of, uh, Human and computer interfaces are going to be ones that do require many hours of training. You know, imagine if I could, let's say, wear a band that is detecting a lot of the, a lot of the, Electrical activity in my median nerve cord in my arm. If I can learn to receive and send data along that cord in an arbitrary way after doing a hundred hours of association exercises, I can be hundreds of times faster than going through the traditional, you know, gesture movements or, uh, you know, schemes that people have come up with. And I think that's going…

AI assessment note: “You're right. And I think businesses are doing what people are naturally wired to want”

Q Is that a sign of a decaying society that the best people won't even defend their own society? Or what is it a sign of?

A Oh man. I, I like to think that it's actually just a, it's like a specific trend of the, of the modern time and strategic pose they're going after. Like this didn't happen by accident. I think China's done a very good job of making China does a great job of keeping the entire world, corporate world, on a hair trigger, where they know that if they do anything that is going to upset China, they won't get access to Chinese markets, and they won't get access to Chinese capital. We see this especially in the media with the film studios. You know, the, the idea of making an anti-China film in the modern day is unthinkable to most of these studios. And so, uh, I, I think that it's not like a, it's not just a sign of moral decay. In fact, I'd say probably eight out of 10 people working in the tech industry If you ask them, do you want the United States to have the strongest military in the world? Eight out of 10 would give you a strong yes. The last, you know, you have one of them that says they're not sure, and one of them that would be against it. So, most people in the tech industry, I think, do agree. The problem is the corporate dynamics make it more profitable to keep China happy and to not piss off the media, which is, uh, kind of disproportionately anti-defense.

AI assessment note: “I think that it's not like a, it's not just a sign of moral decay.”

Q So, so, so fast forward, this shows called the American optimist fast forward, 30 years, we have a lot of more advanced unmanned weapon systems being created. We have AI getting a lot better. Um, what's optimistic about this?

A My optimism is like people focus on the weapon side. They don't focus it on the information side. Like, yeah, information allows you to conduct these strikes, but right now, There are so many unknowns in any military operation. You don't really know what the enemy is doing. You often don't even really know what all of your assets are doing. Imagine a world where every military engagement, or at least the vast majority of them, where you know exactly what is going on, you know exactly what's going to happen, and you know exactly what capabilities you have and what capabilities the enemy has. I think in a world where both sides have similar capabilities, you're actually going to see a lot less work because you can actually figure out what the outcome of many conflicts will be long before it happens.

AI assessment note: “My optimism is like people focus on the weapon side. They don't focus it”

Q They have no idea it's even watching them. Could you put weapons on this thing or that's not a thing you put weapons on?

A So we do not put weapons on it yet. Uh, but you know, I, I think that I, I mean, this is another whole discussion, but I don't think there's a moral high ground in saying you refuse to put weapons on things. I've seen a few other drone companies doing this, like, oh, we would help with this, but we would never, we would never help deploy a weapons system. It's like, look, the, the, the, Like the U S army is a weapon. Uh, the U S green court is a weapon. There's no high ground in, in say, oh, I'm just the guy that found the target pointed a laser at the head and then let something else go after the guy. Like if, If you can make something that allows for more precision strike, less collateral damage, I think it'd be morally reprehensible to refuse to do it, to try and keep your own hands.

AI assessment note: “So we do not put weapons on it yet.”

Q I heard that people were driving these pickup trucks where they would have a metal grate and then they'd look for footprints, uh, the, the metal in the, in the smoothed out dirt. I mean, it was that bad, right?

A Yep. It's called cutting signs. They just drag stuff on the dirt to smooth it out. And then they go back later and look for footprints, look at the direction and then they go and try to find them. I mean, The, the problem is that that's very labor intensive. You spend all of your time trying to understand what happened a while ago. And with our system, one person can understand everything that's happening across hundreds of square miles. That, that's, that's a total game changer when you're talking, especially about military applications where people imagine you can just have an unlimited number of people, but it's not true. You can only have such a large footprint. You know, there's only so many people you can support at one of these forward operating bases. And so if you can take people off of useless tasks, put them to use on useful tasks, That's a, that's a really big deal. Um, and then as far as other products, I think we, we built a few things that kind of enhance the capabilities of our Sentry powers. Uh, well, one of them is Anvil, which is a counter drone interceptor that can knock other drones out of the sky. We built a lot of jamming technology and electronic warfare technology that can, uh, it can detect and destroy and jam a lot of different electronic systems, including drones. Uh, we've built a small sensor. We can call it dust. It's basically a very small dispos…

AI assessment note: “Yep. It's called cutting signs. They just drag stuff on the dirt”

Q Do you still use this sometimes? You bring one in the field with you or something, or no?

A Completely lost the skill, unfortunately. It's one of those ones where you, you, you have to, actually that's not true. I can use one, but I'm nowhere close to the height of where I was when I was a teenager. When I was a teenager, I was able to, you know, take the time to do these types of, types of weird things. I've fallen out of practice because You know, I mostly just use normal computers. It's a, it's a real shame. Uh, but I think there are people who would hugely benefit from it. I think you're going to see industry and military adapting these superhuman interfaces way before the general public, because they're going to be the ones that have a huge incentive.

AI assessment note: “I've fallen out of practice because You know, I mostly just use normal computers.”

Q of science fiction stuff that's possible today. Cause you always think about a lot of areas you've chosen to work in specific ones, but there's a lot of these new things that are possible. I, like, I, I guess even just asking out broadly, what sci-fi technology is possible today that hasn't yet been built? What are the other exciting areas maybe that you're even aren't doing yet right now?

A Oh man, there's a lot of really interesting stuff. Uh, I think one of the big areas is around, this is kind of a broad idea, so there's a lot of ways to apply it, but basically Taking advantage of high skill ceiling interfaces and also taking advantage of neuroplasticity. And those are kind of two separate but linked things. Uh, we've been in this period now for about the last 20 years where everybody has been optimizing user interfaces to be easier and easier to use in the 1:05 minutes. You can pick up the iPhone and use it even if you've never used it before. You can pick up this new app and you can navigate it, you know, perfectly even if you've never used it before. Uh, I don't think that that trend is actually going to continue forever. I don't think things are just going to get simpler.

AI assessment note: “Taking advantage of high skill ceiling interfaces and also taking advantage of neuroplasticity.”