Home robots can launch with narrower functionality than robotaxis

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 15:34

   the analogies that could be pulled there, if any. To start with, the big difference between the two is that, you know, for a driverless robo-taxi, 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 to get there means there's no MVP, there's no launching with something that's partially useful it's like you have to reach that human safety performance and on public roads it's hard to constrain the environment to the point where you make the problem much easier you can operate at night or in sparsely populated areas but the reality is just like you said at any moment anywhere the kid could dart out in front of that vehicle and so you

2. 16:15

   need like a high number of nines of reliability to have any sort of product i think in the home and most consumer 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 reach or the constraints you can put on the system enable you to launch a product much more quickly. And so I think that's one big difference. On this topic, how do you imagine deployment to work? You're obviously like, hey, Tesla had the right path here. Is there a Tesla analogy where you make billions along the way? It's not obvious. Are there constraints you can put around it where you have tell-op, right, or just a couple tasks or a more constrained environment in the messiness of a home? There's a number of ways to attack that. Approaches I've seen are like you sell a

3. 16:58

   really high priced robot today, like a humanoid or something resembling a human that's like fully teleopt and you just tell someone this is going to cost, I don't know, like something crazy, like $50,000 and $1,000 a month. But it's the first robot you can buy that will like do stuff in your house. I think that's one approach to try to make money along the way. I think your market size is pretty small doing that, but that's a viable approach. And the other side would be to sell robots that don't fulfill like the promise of a household robot that does all your chores, but do like little bits of useful things. I just saw at CES this year, they have like little iRobot.

4. 17:30

   but type things that have a tiny little hand that could come out and like pick up a sock that's in the way. And so these are like incremental approaches to sell products and get, you know, data and hopefully like learn about what it would take or train models or try things to be able to work up that ladder, I guess, to the holy grail, which would be like, you know, a robot that takes the place of your butler and your housekeeper and just about anything else that you would ever want, you know, if you could have an infinite staff of people or robots doing things in your home.