Robotics startups should target valuable problems, not easy ones

Transcript

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

1. 1:49:47

   You can't compete with that by building some, like, stocking robot, you know, shelf stocking robot. So what's your advice to robotic entrepreneurs out there? Don't do it, you know, because you're going to be crushed? No, I think that you need to focus on, like Salim says, other... form factors that aren't currently on the roadmap of figure and optimists, you know, things that clean the sides of buildings that climb up the sides or whatever, you know, different form factors, but also talk to them. They're really good people and they need force multipliers around their, around their mission statements. What they, they need the app store equivalent. You know, if you said, I really want to build the next great operating system for the iPhone, you're like, that is crazy. But then when they lay out the app store, which Steve Jobs was

2. 1:50:28

   originally opposed to, but they talked him into it, the App Store unlocked, you know, okay, this is how you interact with the device. The App Store equivalent for the Optimist and the figure robots hasn't been established yet, but that'll put these guys on a productive path instead of a head-on, you know, trying to compete path where they shouldn't be. The bet is that a vertical, deep understanding of that particular domain in the short to medium term, will generate a fair bit of value compared to the long-term generalized robots kind of getting to that domain space over a period of time.

3. 1:51:03

   And I think it's a worthwhile bet. Yeah, I think, Alex, your point is an important one. You know, optimists and figure will flow to the highest value per hour activity. Which is not going to be restocking grocery shelves in the early days. It has to be far more valuable. And to Dave's point, if you are going to chase what's currently unskilled human manual labor, you'd better have robot prices that are priced to match.

4. 1:51:28

   And that's not going to be the general purpose humanoids in the early days. Well, if you're if you're planning on having your shelf stocking robot run on a GPU, forget about it. There's no way you're going to get to get the GPU to do it. If you're doing it with like, you know, old school CPU, whatever, you know, lying around, maybe that'll work. But all these startups are trying to do it with the, you know, they're trying to run, you know, foundation models, Chinese foundation models on GPUs inside the physical robot.

5. 1:51:55

   And usually it's like two GPUs used. There's no way they're going to get those. Interesting. The numbers, though, the numbers are kind of quite significant. Do you know how many people the average grocery store kind of hires? It's 700. It's a big number. So there's a lot of headspace there. 20 bucks an hour or whatever it might be yeah um i mean i think that if you look at it like an optimus or a figure robot like a freaking ninja surgeon robot that can do anything these things are way simpler to do if you're just picking up shelves right? With a couple of human overseers. And in terms of the compute, you could run an entire fleet of them with a Mac mini or two, because again, they don't leave the store. They don't go out onto the streets. They're doing a very limited range of stuff. And this will be money

6. 1:52:46

   that actually Tesla figure won't be looking for. And so you've got an arbitrage between the $20 an hour and the fully loaded, even $3 an hour, $5 an hour for these guys. And they could build a massive business just going after that segment with simpler robots that are run on a local mesh. So I think, you know, we've got to differentiate those and the market opportunity there. And there's loads of market opportunities. And I wanted to share the story for the entrepreneurs out there to hear this dialogue, how to think about what you might move into, what you might build. Alex?

7. 1:53:19

   I would say, so this is advice, chase the high value, not the low value. If this is not prescriptive. But if I had to build a company like this, an example of something that I would not be doing is chasing basically minimum wage human labor. It's low productivity and it's not transformative. It's not how you win this particular game. The way the game of capitalism works is you need to address problems in the market that are both acutely felt and scarce and valuable. And Salim, I was just looking this up, but my understanding is the average grocery store in the U.S. is 26 to 75 workers, and this is not super skilled labor.

8. 1:54:01

   No, no, it's a huge number of part-time workers and all sorts of things, late-night folks that show up to do things. There might be that number full-time, but it's a big number. I used to do a lot of work for Publix and other grocery chains. It's a pretty crazy number. I would say, the way to win if you want to build a robotics company is build something that is transformative, that's attacking the high end of what's hard.

9. 1:54:24

   I think that's exactly right. And also, exactly right. And Elon, in that other video, he may have glossed over everybody, but he said, you know, this may sound circular, but the AI economy is going to feed the AI economy. I forget exactly how he phrased it. But the entrepreneur hearing that should say, I need to be talking to Chase Lochmiller in Abilene or Dario Amodei at Anthropic. the that's the customer base you want to be dealing with if you're looking for the highest leverage use of your robot not a grocery store which a society will get to the grocery store eventually but the highest value Use cases are going to go first, and that's the only place GPU compute is going to be used.

10. 1:55:05

    That's all within this AI community for the next couple of years. So all entrepreneurs should follow that advice. Dave, one of my favorite robot applications that I saw was a large machine, not humanoid, that was deploying solar panels at record speed, right? You know, supporting the innermost loop in the desert. I think that's a great example of robotics. Great example. Great example. The flops want to float to the high end.

11. 1:55:29

    And one of my other favorite metaphors is that of an atomic vacuum cleaner. And in the post-World War II era, there was this notion atomic power would be so ubiquitous that you'd be able to put some sort of atomic energy device in a vacuum cleaner. But that's not what happened. Similarly, while it's sort of fun to contemplate, as much as I would love to see ubiquitous humanoid robots everywhere in the short term for grocery restocking, I just don't think that's the very short-term era of history. Well, let me share the very high-end or high-frontier