The Wisdom Wall
10 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“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 practices and standard are now either like worthless or completely…”
“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, 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, um, essentially chat GPT like technologies instruct these things at a high level with these tools and going into a home environment…”
“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 what it's already doing. Um, it was naive of me to think that…”
“I think they're Very poor tasks to start with counterintuitively. Uh, and the reason for that is laundry and dishes are things for which people are very particular about, 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 car built in the future is going to have these giant…”
“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 Um, you know, pick up all the kids toys and, uh, clean the dishes off the table and put stuff…”
“the bar for commercial success for self-driving was like five, six nines of reliability. And, and understand that each extra nine of reliability you add, so 10 times better, takes probably 10 times more engineering work.”
“The problem comes in when you have a business that is premised on or conditioned upon, um, 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.”