robotics

“I think the robotics world is huge. I think we're, you know, we're like, we're literally warming up. We haven't even left the dugout dugout, right? Like we're like nowhere close to, you know, the scaling on, on robotics. There's a ton of like, The data flywhee…”

“Pushing me now to go into robotics and human noise. I'm like, Bill, too early. No, we need to go.”

“And the cost on the existing use cases probably don't go down at three to five percent at this point in the curve because of the scale brought in, the human capital brought in, the IP bought on, and the fact that you're going to be able to use these general pu…”

“Really quickly with a skilled but low-cost labor force and then add on the robotics has just allowed China to create a quality product at a price that nobody in the rest of the world's really been able to figure out yet.”

“I think that in general, in robotics, the ability to innovate on form factors has been very constrained because of the AI challenge, right? So if you have a traditional AI pipeline, like, you know, you're doing some motion planning and stuff like that, It's ha…”

“It turns out to be like pretty straightforward to go in and like find all those pauses and remove them. And you can speed things up further, so you can get a task where a person demonstrates what it means to succeed, and then you can have the robot practice th…”

“I think the place where I would see the biggest technical risk is dealing with the breadth of different situations. So, I think if we were talking about a well-defined, but, you know, But slightly chaotic environment like cleaning hotel rooms, or working, ah, …”

“And I think increasingly what we'll see is a shift where domains where collecting data is straightforward They actually end up falling into the easy bucket over time, even if they are physically intricate. But there will be domains where collecting data is dif…”

“So, I think that the key is not so much to quantify, like, here is exactly the price tag of getting the ultimate robot data set. The key is to get a system that can go into the world that's useful enough That does a wide variety of different things and they ca…”

“So in my mind, the most important thing to get right is To get the system to be general, and in particular, to get it to be general with respect to how it can be improved, right? So, for example, hand-designed robotic controllers are not very general with resp…”

“I think changing a child's diaper will be really, really hard.”

“Well, that's not often the best assumption because you need the right kind of data. Like, Maybe some data is easy, like, it's easy to get, like, videos of people doing something, but that doesn't mean that's the right kind of data, and it might be domain depen…”

“Where there's a bootstrap challenge, like getting to a particular level of usefulness so that, ah, robots can be deployed so they can do useful tasks, so they can start collecting data from open world settings at scale, and because that's such a, like a sudden…”

“And I think something like that might happen in the world of robotics, but it can't happen today because if you want to put together some cool new robotics applications, some cool new robotics idea, you kind of have to build this, like, monstrous stack, and yo…”

“And so I think in the next six to 18 months, we'll start seeing real breakthroughs in robotics that enable few shot learning, i.e. There's a pre-trained robot model, and now there's a robot that you have hired or bought or whatever. You showed a few examples a…”

“Robots, currently the robot models VLAs Vision Language Action Models, which is very popular right now, is probably Not going to be the thing that ultimately scales beyond. They are inefficient in data. And we can't scale the data for them fast enough.”

“You're going to see like real P&L efficiencies from robotics, Over the next 18 months in their retail business.”

“It's not 20 years. I would say we get the ChatGPT moment for robotics in the next, like, two or three years.”

“Repetitive tasks in controlled environments is, like, more or less solved, and, like, you know, that'll continue to happen. But having tweaked tasks in real-world environments, that's where you need the AI. Like, that's where you need the AI plus the robots. A…”

“I think the exact same thing has happened in robotics. We're investors in, in Sunday robotics which is going after this exact It's such a cool company. It's a cool company, and, you know, they're doing household robots, but the key part before you get to house…”