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TBPN · 3 min · Oct 13, 2026

Why micro machines are an unserved manufacturing space

Jeff Holden

Founder & CEO, Atomic Machines

An early Amazon engineer who helped create Amazon Prime, then Uber's first chief product officer.

  • John CooganHost · Co-host, TBPN

    Co-founded Soylent and Lucy; OpenAI bought his show TBPN in April 2026.

  • Jordi HaysHost · Co-host, TBPN

    Founded Branded Native; co-founded fintech Capital, which Rho bought.

About this segment

Jeff Holden argues that conventional manufacturing physics fails at a few microns, and that chip fabs were built to make only transistors. That leaves micro machines, such as steerable brain robots, without a way to be manufactured.

From “Muse Wonder, Anjney Sizes Up, Neal Stephenson Joins, Social Reckoning Review, Eli Manning Live”, Oct 13, 2026. Watch the full episode

“semiconductor manufacturing was invented to make one kind of machine, right? It's the semiconductor transistor and circuits built around that.”
Jeff Holdenat 2:20:27 · TBPN2:20:27

Takeaways

  1. Macro-scale manufacturing breaks down at the low-digit micron scale
  2. Semiconductor fabs are optimized for a single kind of machine, the transistor
  3. Neurosurgeons want millimeter-scale robots that can be steered through the brain
Watch 2:44 from 2:19:56

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 2:00:08One researcher plus AI agents found a Chrome full-chain exploit in 6 days5:04
  2. 54:13How pooled compute lets startups and public users share GPU capacity4:41

  3. 2:19:56Why micro machines are an unserved manufacturing space2:44

Up next · Latent SpaceRL for materials works by rewarding sub-steps, not whole discoveries4:07

Transcript

From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.

  1. 2:20:03

    Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Like, what we did is we essentially planted a flag in a relatively unserved space, right? Sure. Micro machines, you know, it's a and this is the reason we started here is because it's out of reach of conventional manufacturing. You just can't use traditional kind of macro scale manufacturing technologies because the physics kind of fails you as you go down into the low digit microns. And so what you have left in to make something, anything at any kind of volume at that scale is semiconductor manufacturing. And semiconductor manufacturing was invented to make one kind of machine, right? It's the semiconductor transistor and circuits built around that.

  2. 2:20:41

    So that leaves the whole world of micro machines, which is you can think of as kind of several different domains of physics crossed with kind of a couple of different purposes. It leaves that whole space unserved. And so we've built the first manufacturing system that can actually really fully address that space. But we also went beyond that and we built it in a way that is a combinatorial constructor so that what we're hoping to trigger is a massive kind of innovation explosion at that scale. And you mentioned some of the kind of domains applications.

  3. 2:21:15

    I this is a negative space, so it's hard to put a TAM on it. I think it's extremely large, of course. But things like robotics, micro robotics that can go into difficult environments, including the human body. Medical micro robotics is something people have talked forever, right? It's like, in the early 2000 people were like, it's here, but it's not really here. Turns out you just can't build those things. And like one example of that is I was actually talking to Eddie Chang, who's the head of neurosurgery at UCSF. He said, what we need for a watershed in neurosurgery is like a millimeter scale micro robot that we can insert into the through the cranium into the brain and then steer it to its destination. Sounds It kind of creepy, but like the imagine if you could just if you could carry a little drug payload to any place in the brain. Today, you're limited to you make a hole in the cranium and then whatever you can reach with a straight line tool is what you can get to.

  4. 2:22:12

    And that limits the areas you can operate on. And that's a really simple idea, you know, and it's but like there's just never been a manufacturing technology to make that device. And so, you know, some medical applications, know, little tiny, you know, grain sort of size of a piece of rice kind of dosing pumps, these kinds of things. That's the stuff we'll be able to build. And I'm super excited about medical applications.

  5. 2:22:34

    Yeah. Yeah. Very exciting.