Ep. 14: He Left Sweden for China to Build GPS for Robots

"The AI revolution has almost definitionally not begun until we get physical AI." - Nils Pihl, Auki Labs

Nils Pihl left Sweden for China to fix one missing piece of the internet, a spatial layer that gives robots, AR glasses, and AI agents a shared sense of where they actually are. His company Auki Labs just closed Sweden's largest retailer as its first big enterprise customer, is putting store-manager robots into shops in 2026, and is calling out Western VCs for being scared of breaking $10,000 of robot hands.

In this episode:

• "AI hasn't begun until physical AI" — and 70% of the world economy still runs on atoms
• Why every robot wakes up convinced it's at coordinates 0, 0, 0
• The pyramids' worth of human time lost in Beijing traffic every single week
• Naval Ravikant's missing fifth protocol and the sixth Nils added on top
• Three new internet dimensions: spaces, sensors, actuators
• The 43-gram Mentra glasses that finally make AR wearable all day
• Why drone delivery to apartment 30C still doesn't work
• Closing Sweden's largest retailer as Auki's first enterprise client
• Store-manager robots vs store-worker robots in 2026
• $10,000 of Unitree robot hands shattering in seconds, and why he calls it cheap tuition
• "Be an agent of change or get replaced by people that already are"

About Nils:
Nils Pihl is the founder and CEO of Auki Labs, a spatial-computing startup based in Hong Kong building the real-world web, a protocol giving robots, drones, and AR glasses a shared map of physical space. Born in Sweden, seven years in Beijing, now in Hong Kong. Auki's products include Posemesh (decentralized spatial layer) and Cactus AI for Retail.

Connect:
aukilabs.com

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

The AI revolution has almost definitionally not begun until we get physical AI. 70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and physical labor. Roughly the time it took to build the pyramids, to our best estimate, is lost in Beijing traffic alone every single week. Digital devices don't know where they are in the world, doesn't know I'm sitting in this chair, it doesn't know I'm on this floor, it barely knows I'm in this building. This robot will say, I'm at coordinate zero, zero, zero. And this robot will be like, no, I'm at coordinate zero, zero, zero. And you can either choose to be an agent of change and make decisions and exercise your agency and have an impact on history, or you can get replaced by people that are trying to change the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Yeah, no place like Shenzhen.

SPEAKER_03 1:24

Exactly. That's why one of our guests also told us if you want to build hardware, if you want to build your product, you have to come here, right? But that's also like one of the questions we get asked the most is how do I start? I mean, it's obvious when I came here, it's it's it still has some barriers, China. It's it's still a closed system, ecosystem somehow. And it's always the question of how do I find reliable partners, right? How do I know I can trust this business? Yeah, um yeah, we we've helped so many startups already and um people to source products, but it's still hard to navigate, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:01

It is. I mean, we have so many people coming to us asking the same questions all the time. How do I find business partners? How do we do the contracts with them? How do we do the payments? And um, that's why we are very happy that we partnered up with World First, right? The sponsor of today's episodes, and they have this great system that solves a big, big problem payment. So, World First is originally a London startup, and uh they got acquired in 2019 by End Financial, which um is the mother of Alipay. We all know Alipay, right? So, and they have this system now where they have 1.5 million businesses who are already inside the system, and if you do business with and in China, they help you to resolve a lot of your problems. So they have real-time payment, no hidden fees, and you can do it inside the ecosystem. So it is safe, it is reliable, and it's fast. So um, if we have uh people watching this and they want to do business in and with China, we think Word First is a really great choice, and we are very happy that they partnered up with us. So we put the link in the description if you're interested in doing safe, reliable business in China uh without any hidden fees. Word first is your choice number one, and you will find all the information in the description. Niels, welcome. Welcome, thanks for having me. So let's directly dive in. I mean, we already talked uh a lot uh off camera. What I would be interested, you have a long-term vision. How do you imagine the world in 10 years? How will we live? How will we interact with robots?

SPEAKER_02 3:51

I think that we are going through a period of time now that I like to call the great reversal. And what the great reversal is, is that for decades, we human beings, we have been disappearing into digital worlds, you know, be it social media or computer games. But now, during the great reversal, digital things are coming into the physical world instead. And they're doing so through robotics, physical AI, but also augmented reality. We are making the physical world accessible to AI now. And that's going to be very impactful for many reasons. Like economically, 70% of the world economy is still tied to physical locations and physical labor, both as a you know, rough percentage of GDP, but also as a rough percentage of headcount, right? So the AI revolution has almost definitionally not begun until we get physical AI, because that's where most of what AI could do. But also, I actually think that that number is gonna grow. As it gets cheaper to operate atoms and do things in the physical world, we are gonna want more things in the physical world. So I think 10 years from now, it's going to be more than 70% of the world economy is tied to the physical world. And perhaps paradoxically, more of it is also gonna be tied up with artificial intelligence. I think that uh it's likely that over the next 10 years we might see the world economy grow by a full order of magnitude, right? That the world economy in 10 years it'll be 10 times bigger than it is today. And that might sound crazy, but you actually only have to believe that the economy will grow three times faster than it grew in the previous decade for something like that to be true. Uh the economy is already like 10 times bigger than when I was born uh in the 80s. And I think more and more of the economy is going to be wrapped up in AI to AI transactions. I think an important part of the economy that we're kind of starting to talk about now is the economy of electricity. Like we're talking a lot about data centers and stuff now. But where I think ultimately what we were talking about a lot is how to move electricity. So like batteries, right? Because today, let's think about two technologies that are like for sure coming and are for sure gonna be very impactful uh on civilization. One is the robots, obviously, and the other is augmented reality glasses. I I very much believe that both of these technologies are gonna be hugely, hugely impactful. And both of them have these very serious battery constraints, right? Like if you ask a humanoid robot to actually do something, it'll be out of battery in two hours. Yeah. Right. And so range anxiety for robots is very, very real. And I think that more and more of the world economy will be running on batteries. Like more and more of the world's labor will be in robots and and glasses that are running on batteries. And I one of my most uh perhaps sci-fi visions of where we will be in 10 years is that we will be thinking about battery life much closer to how we're thinking about currency today. Uh, like how much battery am I willing to spend on this? How much battery am I willing to spend on this? Um and potentially that currency as we have it today is maybe not necessarily gonna be as meaningful. I mean, I guess it's always true that whatever decade we're in is the most impactful decade, because you know, we've been on this exponential for a long time. But it it's it's very clear to me that the world is gonna be very different 10 years from now from where it is today. And the the big theme is this great reversal that now the computers are coming into our world, the digital intelligence is coming into the physical world. And I don't want to gloss over augmented reality in this, uh, because you know that's where we have our roots and how we fell into robotics. I think that augmented reality is going to play a huge role in human-to-robot communication. Because robots actually kind of live in augmented reality, if you think about it, right? Like an amazing thing that we demonstrated at Aoki is that you can use augmented reality on your phone to instruct a robot what to do. Right. So if you think of a like a normal cleaning robot in a supermarket, for example, and there's a spill somewhere, how do you tell the robot to come come clean that spill specifically? Today, you either don't, because the robot runs on a schedule, or you have to go back to the back office and open up the computer and click on a map. Uh so you have to you know be smart enough to understand here's where the spill was and where to put it on a map. And here's a crazy stat 60% of people younger than me in the Western world cannot read a map. So like if you remove the little blue dots, more than half of people are just fucked. Like they don't know, they don't know how to read a map. Like that's a that's a that's a lost lost art.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

I mean, it's it's it's not necessary anymore, right? Yeah. I mean I remember the times when my parents took us to holidays to Spain, and my mom was sitting on the uh seat next to my dad and uh looking at the map. And this is something that was very crucial. Um it's like uh it was very dangerous for my parents' marriage because they were also fighting about it. But this is super interesting because we we don't need it anymore. Now we have like GPS and uh tells us where to go and what to do.

SPEAKER_02 10:17

So yeah, the GPS works pretty great outdoors. Um a lot of people So this is actually how I fell into robotics. I wanted to make augmented reality for my favorite tabletop game. I didn't know anything about augmented reality at the time. And what I imagined was like, hey, here's this tabletop game, and I want us both to be able to see augmented reality overlays. Um and since I didn't know anything about the GPS or spatial computing, I just kind of assumed that, like, oh, you know, the device knows where it is, right? It turns out no, in hindsight, it should have been obvious. Like, digital devices don't know where they are in the world. And GPS is actually a line of sight technology. So it doesn't know where we are right now, it doesn't know I'm sitting in this chair, it doesn't know I'm on this floor, it barely knows I'm in this building. And that realization was, oh my, oh my God, like how are we gonna get AR glasses and robots and things like this if we don't know where things are? And I realized it's just just missing part of the tech tree and fell in love with that problem space. And what's great with augmented reality is it's essentially the problem of robotics if you remove the arms and legs, right? It's only the part of how do I, as a digital device, reason about my movement through space. So the way augmented reality works is literally the same way a robot reasons about moving through space using uh things like SLAM, simultaneous localization and mapping. So we realized that, okay, augmented reality is a great way to communicate with the robot. If you can get the phone and the robot into the same coordinate system, then I can actually, when I see this spill in the supermarket, I can just take out my phone, point at the spill, and tell the robot, come clean this up. And because the phone and the robot is in the same coordinate system, it can understand. Last year, uh, I think in November, something like this, I think we were the first team in the world to demonstrate that we could communicate with a robot using glasses. So we had a pair of glasses that have a camera, and the camera was streaming to essentially a robot movement server that analyzes um the camera feed for understanding how we're moving through space. So that server could keep track of the precise position of the glasses. That meant that when you say, hey, robot, come help me, the robot understood precisely where we were. It's like, oh yeah, I'll come to where the glasses are because I understand where the glasses are. Um so augmented reality, very helpful way to communicate with the robots, but also, you know, spiritually, actually a very helpful way to communicate with humans, right? Human language is the original augmented reality, right? A story I used to tell all the time was if we were to imagine that we're walking through a forest together and we come across a fallen tree, and I point at that fallen tree, and I say, Hey, look at that beautiful couch. Something very interesting happens in our collective psyche when I do that, because now we see the sittingness of this fallen tree, right? And that may not have been in our consciousness before. What language allows us to do, which is incredibly powerful, is that we can manifest our imagination in the minds of other people, right? It allows us to do intercognitive computing in a sense. We want to make sure that we have the same state across our minds. And language allows us to do that. And part of making language better and better is finding better compression for language. Every industry, every hobby develops its own kind of language because it compresses how many words I need to say for you to understand me. Right. And augmented reality is an incredibly powerful way to compress information. Consider, for example, again, the supermarket scenario. If you're the store manager and you're a store associate, and there's a task that you want to leave for him, today, what you would have to do is you would have to explain in words where this task is. Like, oh, it's in the it's over in this aisle next to blah, blah, blah. Let's say that there's a a broken fixture or something, right? You're gonna have to spend so many words explaining precisely where this is, or you're gonna have to to walk Thomas over there, or you leave a piece of digital information in physical space. Right? Augmented reality, I super believe, is the the future of human language. I think 10 years from now, uh, we'll be able to sit on a balcony here in Shenzhen, we're all wearing the glasses, and across uh across uh there's another building, and we see something funny in one of the specific windows. And using augmented reality, I'll be able to put a marker in your field of view precisely what window it is, right? Like look, that one. And it just appears in your uh in your field of view. Uh when you can do that, and when you can prompt your imagination into someone else's field of view, that's as close as we can get to telepathy uh without like literally messing with the brain. So this is the great reversal. The great reversal is the the robots are coming, the digital things are coming, but also uh we are going to start using digital intelligence to talk to each other through augmented reality.

SPEAKER_03 16:33

Yeah, that's a very precise way to collect also a lot of data, right? I I remember last month there was uh something going super viral also on X, like rent a human. Yeah. Right? Where you where the AI agents now use humans in order to let them do some jobs also in order to collect data, right? So uh yeah, it's uh it's a funny, funny way now how this whole in evolves the whole like the industry, how we interact with humans, uh with humanoids or robots. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

So the question is, is this uh funny or is it scary? It's both. The the the window example, for example.

SPEAKER_02 17:13

It's both, right? Like every time that we get uh better at communicating, we get better at telling the truth, but we also get better at lying, right? So it depends a lot on who we are as a civilization and uh where where our collective collective psyche is at. Like AI video generation, is this good or bad? The internet, very much social media, yeah. Depends very much on who we are as people, right? I'm very excited that we have the internet. I'm also very scared of the internet. I'm very excited that we have AI. I'm also very scared of AI. It's very powerful technology, and it's happening a lot faster than our introspection is. We don't spend enough time thinking about how we interact with this technology and what it means to be a man or a citizen or you know, what kind of responsibilities we have to our family, to our state, things like this in in a world where we are all so powerful. I I wish we would spend more time just thinking about, yeah, like what does it mean to be a good man this decade? Um, like what does what does responsible information consumption look like? What does responsible information propagation look like? My personal motto in in life or my my North Star is three words, spread good memes, right? Just be mindful of how I interact with the information landscape. Right? If a if a meme is a piece of copiable behavior, right, I need to think about what behaviors am I copying? What behaviors am I putting out that other people may copy? Am I being mindful of my input and output? And I think one of the most uh meaningful things to do as a human being, because I think what makes humans so unique is that we have this mimetic landscape. Uh we have language, we have culture built of language. Everything that makes us truly unique is made of language, as uh the late great Terence McKenna used to say. So if we really want to lean on our humanity in the age of AI, I think start with spread good memes. Think about how do you consume information, how do you put information out there.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

So and what does it mean for um white-collar worker? I mean, you talked about it, you said uh a lot of white-collar jobs will be dead or are dead already. Actually, like now in 2026, I would be very scared if I would be a white-collar worker. What does all this mean for them?

SPEAKER_02 20:17

I think it's very important to exercise agency right now. You have to be a self-starter. Like there are so many problems worth solving in the world, but less and less there will be someone telling you what to do and paying you to do it. More and more, you're gonna have to find a problem yourself, and you'll also be more capable than ever to solve it yourself. So you need agency. The the era of having a cushy European job with very little output any given week, you know, like, oh, I'm just doing some data entry or whatever. That's clearly gone. And that's both good and terrifying. You know, everyone needs to know how to feed their family, obviously. We all also need to find a way to actually contribute to society, right? And now we have more power than ever to contribute, but also more pressure than ever to contribute.

SPEAKER_03 21:22

That's that's what I find the most is is super scary. Like you really have to do something, you can't be too comfortable. Like we talked about it, right? If you get too comfortable with uh with life and with your achievements from the past, when you look at some countries in in Europe, it's very dangerous.

SPEAKER_02 21:40

So I I I am worried, you know, how employable will I be five years from now. Yeah, but maybe um employment is not the right way to think about it. It's more about what can I do that other people will be willing to pay me for? Yeah, I think companies will shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink. Right. But headcount. Yeah. Companies will shrink in terms of headcount. They've already stopped growing, I feel. There's you know an endless amount of problems that humanity has. There's a lot that you can do. You're just gonna have to like be self-guided and agentic yourself. Yeah if not, you're gonna have a tough time.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

The problem you identified is GPS, right? GPS has some restrictions. I'm very interested in this because for me, as a non-expert, I would say GPS is an amazing thing. And even if you think of AirTags, for example, in your phone or in your headphones, they also work with GPS, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:39

They work with GPS and Wi-Fi trilateration and ultra-wide band trilateration. They're using a lot of different uh techniques to position them. Like when you find your air tag between the couch cushions, uh that's using ultra wide band to do that. Whereas when you have forgotten your air tag somewhere and you see on a map, um it may have used Wi-Fi, uh, a mix of Wi-Fi and GPS to correctly place the thing. But that last you know, a couple of centimeters of where is it, that's using ultra-wide band. That's not using GPS.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

So in the then you said, okay, your mission is to solve this problem.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

We want to make sure that devices, you know, machines, can have an improved shared understanding of the physical environment, um, so that they can coordinate uh with others, but also with themselves over time. Right. You can if you think of robotics, you could say that robotics is made up of six layers that are very important, right? So one layer is locomotion, the ability for the robot to traverse the environment. And then there's manipulation, the ability for the robot to affect the environment. But even if you had a robot that, you know, knows how to grab things and knows how to traverse the environment, you still can't ask it to go empty all the trash cans here uh in in this building. Because to do that, it's also gonna need uh perception. More specifically, it's gonna need spatio semantic perception. Spatial meaning it understands the difference between something being far away or close, uh, which is not a given, right? Like this is something you really have to teach computers to do well. And semantic reasoning, meaning it needs to understand the difference between a trash can and a baby, right? And once you have those first three things, uh locomotion manipulation and perception, now you have the first robot that you could in theory ask to go empty all the trash cans. But it's gonna bounce around like a first generation Roomba looking for trash cans until you give it mapping. So what is mapping? Mapping is just a memory of perception. Like where did I see things before? That's what a map is, right? Once you have mapping, then you need to also understand where you are in relation to the map. Like where am I on the map? Like, sure, I know that there are is there's a trash can here on the map and a trash can here on the map, but where am I on the map? Again, you know, 60% of people younger than me can't read a map. Robots don't read maps, right? So you have to give them positioning. And outdoors, they get positioning from from GPS uh with a few meters of accuracy, but indoors they they don't. And then finally, the six-layer, you know, the uh deployment applications layer, you need to like tie all of these capabilities together to get the robot to actually do something. And what we saw was that almost all attention and money is going towards locomotion and manipulation, uh, and very little is going towards solving perception, mapping, and positioning. And what we want to do is we want to work on collaborative perception, collaborative mapping and collaborative positioning so that multiple devices can have a shared understanding of the environment. And to that end, we're building this protocol we call the real world web, which is essentially the internet for physical spaces, uh, making physical spaces browsable, searchable, navigable to robots and AI. And on top of the real world web, uh, we've started building some successful applications of our own, but uh we also enable other robotics companies to build better products on top of the real world web themselves.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

But this is a crazy task. I mean, it took it took like hundreds and thousands of years to map the world as we know now know the world. And now your task is you want to map every building, every space in the world. Even if we take this building, we're sitting here, it says like uh I don't know, 30, 40 floors and hundreds of offices. This would be like a huge task. And you lived in Beijing before. Beijing has more cars than people live in LA, for example. So so this is um how do you tackle this?

SPEAKER_02 27:24

So uh an important distinction is that AUCI is not trying to build one big map of the world, just like the internet is not one big website, right? We make it possible for any place in the world to make their own local physical website, okay, right? So you can choose to map this space and have it on your hardware, just like you could host your website on your server, right? That's why we call it the real world web. It's really like the internet. It's not that we are trying to build one big website that contains the map of the entire world. We are making a protocol for robots to move between local maps of the world. So if I have a map of MySpace and you have a map of your space, uh a robot will be able to uh navigate uh both MySpace and your space by uh talking to the real world web. So uh our job is not to map the world specifically. Our job is to build a protocol that allows any kind of device capable of mapping the world or needing maps of the world to find each other and collaborate uh with each other?

SPEAKER_00 28:37

So, how does it actually work? If we have two robots here in this building, uh they are responsible for for the rubbish or for all the bins, and uh one did uh floor one to twelve and then needs to go and charge the battery. How does this robot then in in your in the future tell the other robot uh the last bin, uh trash bin I emptied was in 1204 in the boss's office? You continue from there.

SPEAKER_02 29:07

So the way you just did it was purely semantic, right? Like you didn't use any map information. You just said this floor and you gave like a room number. That's a semantic description. Uh and a semantic description is not super helpful unless you already have a sense of how to navigate the space, right? Just because you know it's room 1204 or whatever, if you don't know where room 1204 is, you're gonna be looking for room 1204. What you want is you want both robots to have a shared map of the space, a shared coordinate system, so that when one robot says 1204, the other robot immediately understands what that means and already knows how to get there, right? So uh that's what the real world web allows. The first problem we tackled was like, how do we, before anything else, how do we at least get you into the same coordinate system? Right? How do we at least get you into the same coordinate system? Because that's not for free, right? The devices don't exist in the same coordinate system today. Anytime a robot wakes up and starts doing this slam simultaneous localization and mapping, it invents a single-use coordinate system every time. Meaning that if one robot wakes up here and one robot wakes up here, and this robot will say, I'm at coordinate zero, zero, zero. And this robot will be like, no, I'm at coordinate zero, zero, zero. Right? How do you get them into the same coordinate system? That that was the first problem that we tackled. Once you have that, once they are in the same coordinate system, then you can start building shared maps. Then you can start putting digital information relative to physical space.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

So when we talked about the good and the bad of the internet, you like you read something uh from Naval and said, okay, this is something that was a wake-up call for you, and where you said, okay, I have to tackle this problem, I have to build a business out of it.

SPEAKER_02 31:09

So yeah, in 2014, Naval Rovikant wrote a blog post that it seems like he's since taken down, which I'm a little bit confused by. Uh, but um it argued that the internet was missing a fifth protocol, a way to deal with monetary value, a way to transact between machines, like agent-to-agent payments. And he was saying this already in 2014, which is pretty wild. And what he used as an example that really resonated with me at the time, because I was living in Beijing, is he said, well, imagine a world where you know everyone has self-driving cars, and these self-driving cars have to negotiate the use of a scarce resource, the road. Like there's limited space on the road. And they want to do something like a lane merge. How do you get two AIs to agree who should let who go first? Like, how is that resolved? Uh, especially if they are from different manufacturers running different logic. How can we make this possible? And what he envisioned was actually there's going to be a layer of the internet that he called the fifth protocol that uh will allow devices to pay each other. So one car will say, I'm willing to pay one cent to cut ahead of you right now. And the other car can say, like, yeah, I'll take that. I'll take one cent. Sure. Right. The idea was that if you can put some kind of numerical value to your priorities so that you can communicate priorities across different agents, that is super helpful. And if those priorities actually map to the economic interests of the agent or the agent's owner, that makes it even better. So we need to build this fifth uh protocol. And what I realized several years later is like, yes, there is a fifth protocol missing, but there's also a sixth protocol missing, which is well, how do these devices talk about space? Right. You you you preempted this story by bringing up uh Beijing has more cars on the road than people in Los Angeles, right? So just for the listeners to get a sense of scale, right? There are millions and millions of people commuting by car in Beijing on any given day. And the average commute is close to two hours. And if you do the quick back of the napkin calculation, it means that roughly the time it took to build the pyramids, to our best estimate, is lost in Beijing traffic alone every single week. Right. So if we want to uh imagine us getting back some percentage of that lost human productivity, we want to imagine our self-driving cars able to coordinate with each other, right? To say that, okay, I'm driving this fast. I here's precisely where I am. And now that you know that, maybe you want to slow down just a little bit so we don't hit each other at the intersection, et cetera. But to do that, they need to be able to communicate very, very precisely about where they are in space and very, very precisely about how quickly they're moving, etc. And there's no rails on the internet to do that today. Like the GPS is not precise enough for that today. And there's no uh like spatial communication channel where they know how to find each other and tell each other these kinds of things. So yeah, I think that's a missing part of the internet. In fact, I think there are three missing pieces of the internet that are gonna start getting built out over this next decade. So uh you can think of it as three new dimensions that the internet is growing into. So one is uh an internet of spaces, an internet of maps, essentially. We've been talking about this already, right? The the next layer is the internet of sensors. How can one AI look at the world through another machine? Right? How can my self-driving car look through the cameras of another car when it goes around a corner so that I can figure out do I need to slow down? Like, is there anything on the road? That's the internet of sensors. You might want your agent to be able to log in to different public CCTV cameras, things like this, pay a small amount to the local government for borrowing the camera to look for your missing child or whatever. So the internet of sensors. And the third is the internet of actuators, right? The internet of robot hardware, which you can think of as like teleoperation for robots, like robots teleoperating other robots, if that makes sense. Like AI teleoperating other robots. So that when you tell your agent that, like, hey, I really want you to buy my wife this really rare purse that's on sale right now in New York. I can't buy it online. The agent goes, no problem. I'm just gonna sign in to this nearby humanoid robot. I'm gonna pilot that humanoid robot. I'm gonna buy the bag and I'm gonna drop it off at the mail, and then I'm gonna sign out of the humanoid robot, right? That's the internet of actuators. So I think the internet is gonna get these three new dimensions that will just be a permanent part of civilization after that. Uh, the internet of spaces, the internet of sensors, and the internet of actuators. And this is what we're building towards with the real world web. We started with the spaces, and now we are increasingly adding support for signing into sensors and signing into hardware in general.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

So you said like if I would be the management of this building, I would buy some robots to do the cleaning, whatever, then you would help me to teach them to communicate with each other to set up everything. But how would it work for private households? Because people have the dream. I talk to people that they say, Oh, in the morning, I need a coffee, I'm still in bed on the weekend, and then I just call a robot service from outside, and the robot uh knows what is my favorite cup, uh, what where are my beans, and then the robot will come to my house, make my coffee, bring it to my bed, and then leave and go to other people's house. How would that work?

SPEAKER_02 37:43

Well, today the robot would have a tough time finding your apartment in a building like this, right? Um, and if you it's actually even more fun to think of it as a drone delivery problem. Because let's say you live in apartment 30C, right? So on the 30th floor, apartment C. There is no way today for a drone to know which apartment that is from the outside. Why? Because there's no public registry of which floors does this building skip. Like a lot of buildings here will skip the fourth floor, some will skip the 14th and the 24th, but not all, right? Almost everyone skips the fourth. Some skip the 14th, some skip the 24th, right? The drone doesn't know. And also which one is A, B, and C facing which direction? Right? So how would you explain to a drone where your balcony is? How would you do that? Right. You you need to be able to express it in some way that the drone can can understand. You could do it in a GPS coordinate system, but the GPS reading for the drone is not going to be accurate enough, right? Like the GPS has an accurate coordinate system, it just doesn't have accurate uh positioning. So you can describe this precise location on the table right here, in theory, in the GPS coordinate system. The problem is how did you make that measurement? Does that make sense? Right. How accurate was your measurement? So what will happen, I think, is your building will create a publicly accessible map that they either store on someone else's cloud or they store it on their own machines, just as they do with their website. You know, like maybe they self-host, maybe they put it on a cloud somewhere. That's up to them, right? But they are gonna create a physical website. We call it a domain, right? They're gonna create a domain of the building so that when the delivery robot or delivery drone shows up, it can authenticate against that map and be like, okay, I'm going to Thomas apartment. Now I understand how to get to Thomas apartment because this building had a map of itself.

SPEAKER_03 39:58

But that's also like super scary, right? Like most of the people that I talk to, like when I tell them, okay, I moved to China, it's like, aren't you afraid of all these cameras? They took you, take your data and they do whatever. I don't know. But then this is even a step further, right? If you think of it, okay, I'm living now in this building, and there's a map from this building, and like somewhere, someone actually knows exactly how to enter my apartment. Well, what is the concern?

SPEAKER_02 40:28

I think today there are already, you know, like fire escape maps and things like this, and uh someone already knows where you live. The problem is the people that you want to know where you live don't. You want the delivery driver to know where you live, you want the delivery robot to be able to get to you, and they don't know how to do that today. Like if you're worried about like some intelligence agency or organized crime or something like that, they have no, they have no problem finding out right. It's the robots that need help.

SPEAKER_00 41:03

And that's where we come back to the conspiracy theory that all the delivery, especially especially in China, it's all a big data collection program. But it it kind of makes sense, right? If I order my my milk tea to 30C, then the guy he will come and then maybe he can film the elevator. He can also already map. Is there a 14th floor? Yes or no? Then he puts the milk tea in front of my door, he takes a picture and is calling me. Yeah. So um, yeah, and and you also talk a lot about the human and robotics um cooperation, how they work together. And you talked about the glasses, right? Glasses are very important for this. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit on this.

SPEAKER_02 41:46

Yeah, I I think in the very near future, the majority of humans will wear glasses, just like the you know, most at least in the developed world. Like most of us have phones and laptops, and we're gonna have glasses. And the reason why is because increasingly we are gonna work with AI, and AI is gonna help us be the best versions of ourselves. And what glasses allow the AI to do is to hear what we hear and see what we see, so that it can always give us uh you know, contextually relevant recommendations. So I actually think glasses might be the biggest delay to robots taking our jobs, because a human with glasses will be able to do their job so much better than a human without the glasses that the ROI on the robot gets pushed into the future. Right? So if you think of something like uh a car mechanic today, right? They they know how to use a certain set of tools. Maybe they're a licensed like Toyota car mechanic and they know their way around a Toyota very well. But maybe they don't know their way around a BMW and don't feel comfortable repairing a BMW. Put a pair of glasses on them and an AI that knows every car. And now uh this human who knows how to operate the tools and follow the instructions from the AI can now repair anything. Uh uh a washing machine, a spaceship. Or surgeries. Yeah, for example. Well, I think surgeries are tricky because you need very good fine uh like motor skills. But maybe you could get like Warhammer painters or something like that to become surgeons.

SPEAKER_00 43:31

But maybe it's tricky now, but not in the future when they were because I saw some uh videos of um surgery robots doing it with uh lemon or with a fruit or something, and they are very did very, very precise stitches.

SPEAKER_02 43:45

The robots are getting very, very good at it now. Yeah. Right. Um You know, there's a lot of robots building luxury cars, and it's not because they're cheaper than human workers, it's because they are better than human workers at getting a consistent result. Right. And if you make a high quality car, you want consistent results. Right. You want the gap between the door to be exactly 1.5 millimeters on every single car. And a robot or you know, an army of robots is better at getting that result than the the humans are. Because you can teach robots today to be better at some manipulation tasks than most or even all humans. But humans are very good at general purpose manipulation, right? Like we're not all good enough to be a surgeon. Like we're not all skilled enough with our hands to be surgeons. Even if someone told us exactly what to do, some of us have two shaky hands and things like that, right? Um but almost everyone can perform almost every task. They just don't know how to do it. And AI will show us how to do it. So think of, for example, retail workers, right? Retail workers with these glasses will have a perfect understanding of where's every product, what needs to get done, what am I doing next, and we'll just be way, way more productive, but also happier, like having a better time at work. And you know, if if the human being gets 50 or 100% more productive, which I think might actually be a low estimate for some of these low skill and low motivation jobs, I think it's possible, you know, that with good gamification and good AI, good glasses, your typical your typical retail worker will be three times more productive than they are today. Well, that that really makes it a lot harder to replace them with a robot. Right? Uh, because all of us, you know, a robot today is like a state-of-the-art retail robot is maybe 10% as good as a human, right? We're still pretty far away. So if the glasses just make us 300% better over the next five years, then that's gonna delay the the coming of the robots. I I think almost everyone's gonna wear glasses because they're just gonna make us so good at everything that we want to do.

SPEAKER_03 46:19

Yeah, it's also with the with the AI agents and everything right now. Like, as soon as I feel disconnected from the internet, I feel like, oh, what am I going to do now? Anxiety. Anxiety. Like I I cannot I cannot continue my task. Like I feel super unproductive. Like if I'm wearing those glasses and they run out of battery, I would, you know.

SPEAKER_02 46:39

Yeah. You would imagine a pair of glasses that uh as you're on your way back home from work and you see the grocery store, it reminds you that hey, you promised your wife uh that you would get milk, actually. Amazing, right? We will be better husbands, we will be better workers, we will be better parents. The glasses, like AI will just help us be the best version of ourselves. And this is what we saw with white-collar work too. You know, like it didn't take all the programming jobs, all the lawyer jobs, but every good programmer uses AI now, and every good lawyer uses AI now, and they are better at their job because they're doing that. And that's gonna be true for everything in the physical world as well. It doesn't matter if you're stitching together footballs in Pakistan or disassembling UFOs in Area 51, right? It doesn't matter. You put on the glasses and you're gonna be better at that job.

SPEAKER_00 47:33

There are already a lot of glasses on the market right now, but you don't see anyone wearing them, like besides some nerds. So what do you think? When will they actually be part of our everyday life?

SPEAKER_02 47:43

So one of my very best friends runs a glasses company, and he blew my mind with a in hindsight very obvious realization. He said that glasses were invented roughly 800 years ago, but it wasn't until the 1920s or so that people started wearing glasses all day. Why? Well, it wasn't until the 1920s or so that material science had gotten good enough that you could make glasses that were around 40 grams. It turns out the human face doesn't deal with weight over that very well. And, you know, so if you try to put on a pair of AR glasses that weighs like 100 grams, they're gonna end up in your pocket. Like the like the Apple glasses, right? That's also why they discontinued. Things need to be light enough. So my friend just put out a pair of fully open source programmable camera glasses that are only 43 grams. They're comfortable enough that you can actually wear them all day. They just launched them just under a month ago. As soon as I've made the apps that I want for these glasses, I'm gonna wear them. I think the big challenge, you know, to throw back to our earlier conversation about battery economy is to these kinds of glasses with that form factor, maybe an hour of battery, right? But luckily, here in Asia, things like neck fans are pretty popular and there are neck batteries. So I'm definitely getting a neck battery for my glasses. And then I'm gonna have my own personal AI co-pilot that uh that reminds me of of everything. You know, I'm never gonna forget anyone's name anymore. I'm not gonna forget to do the grocery shopping. I'm not gonna miss my appointments. And I just record your beatings and everything. I'll be a better I'll be a better human because of it.

SPEAKER_00 49:30

Yeah. So we need to get the glasses under 40 grams.

SPEAKER_02 49:33

They need to be under 45 grams. Uh I mean the lighter the better. The lighter the better. The Metra glasses are 43 grams now, and you can wear them all day. Uh if they were 35 grams, then you know, obviously even better. And they are getting smaller and smaller. But battery is going to be a big, big concern. In fact, actually, battery was one of the first problems that I realized about augmented reality and you know, the not too distant future that made me want to build the real world web, like as a big like civilization scale thing. Because before then I was just kind of working on simple techniques for doing shared augmented reality. And there was no like civilization scale infrastructure play to it. And what I realized was like, I believe the glasses are coming. I believe in every version of human history we invent glasses, just like in every version of human history, we we probably invent pornography. It's just it's something that humans do, right? Augmented reality is just what humans do because it's language, and we are always making better language. We're always making better language. So if the glasses are coming for sure, what are the obstacles on the way, right, that I could work on solving? And battery was so clearly one of these issues. But you know, I'm not a battery engineer. So the issue is that augmented reality, any kind of spatial computing, any kind of computer trying to understand the physical space is very, very battery intensive. Very, very battery intensive. So the idea was okay, we're gonna have to move that compute away from the face, right? If we want them to be small enough that we can wear them, then obviously the compute can't happen on my face, because that's gonna eat too much battery. The compute has to happen somewhere else. It has to be that this only streams the sensor data to a computer somewhere else. But then the problem becomes latency. Like how long does it take to send information to the cloud and back? And for augmented reality, if we want to imagine that, like, hey, I can have an augmented reality pet that's with me all the time, then you know, when I move my head around like this, uh the latency needs to be extremely low, right? Nowhere near what you can get from the cloud. So it's like, okay, well, then the compute has to be closer. So what would that look like? Well, then when I'm at home, my glasses talk to my Mac Mini. And when I step out into my apartment complex, it talks to my apartment complex. And when I step onto the subway, it talks to the subway. And when I arrive at work, it connects to work. Uh, we need to be able to connect to hyper-local compute resources to preserve battery. And if you build something like that, then civilization will use it because the battery economy is surely coming, right? We can we can see the science of this now. I sounded a little kooky when I was talking about it in 2021, but now people see it. Like, oh yeah, like energy management is going to be one of the big questions uh of our time. And I think even for the robots, the ability for the robot when it goes to the mall to shopping for you to offload some of its compute to local compute resources in the mall in exchange for a bit of money so it gets longer battery. It's just like a no no-brainer economic decision for everyone, right? You're happy to pay half a dollar to give your robot um, you know, another hour worth of battery uh so it can finish your tasks for you. And um half a dollar is a good markup on the electricity for them all. And they now make a little bit of money, you know. Robots don't look at ads. It's gonna be a problem for our economy, right? Robots don't look at ads. So, how are we gonna monetize uh like our retail spaces, things like this? Well, we're gonna monetize it by providing maps and context and things that the robot needs to perform its job. So things like visual positioning systems that allow augmented reality navigation and robot navigation have been solved for a pretty long time, but there hasn't been a good economic model for it. Like there are moss out there that have visual positioning systems now, but they're not open to your robot. Your robot can't connect to it because they built that visual positioning system for some specific maybe AR use case or something that they had in mind so that they could do like navigation with ads or something. And your robot can't access it. So we're basically telling the malls like, okay, well, 10 years from now, a very sizable percentage of everyone that's shopping in here is gonna be a robot and they don't look at ads. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna open up your visual positioning system and you're gonna be able to sell uh mapping data and positioning data to the robot at a comparable rate to what you get for advertising for the humans. And that's how you don't die, right? Like that's how you keep making money in the age of age of robots. And like I just fully believe that this is where civilization is going and that civilization will still work that way a thousand years from now, right? I've had uh long conversations with the mushroom about what we can build today that will still be relevant in five years, in 50 years, in 500 years, in 5,000 years. And what that is is well, these three new dimensions of the internet. The internet is still gonna be around 5,000 years from now. The internet is still gonna be important. And robots are still gonna want to be able to ask questions about the physical world 5,000 years from now. They're still gonna want to be able to ask questions about other people's sensors 5,000 years from now. And they're still gonna want to be able to hop into some other robot body 5,000 years from now. So that's the particular flavor of Kool-Aid that we're drinking at Auki. That's like, hey, let's build something that's still gonna be relevant 5,000 years from now.

SPEAKER_00 55:44

Yeah, and it's not just uh talking or the vision you actually made a big deal with a European retailer to help them solve some of their problems. What was their problem?

SPEAKER_02 55:53

Yeah, we we closed our first big enterprise client uh not that long ago. It's Sweden's largest retailer. And what we realized we could do for them with spatial computing is if you think about you know the computer game of retail, what the game is about is which products should I carry that my customers want to buy? And there's some AI tooling for that and analytics for that. How should I price my products? And there's some AI tooling and stuff for that. But then it's also where should I place them in my store? How much space should I give them? Because that's a scarce resource that I have. I only have this many shelf meters, and I need to choose how much space each product gets and where to put it to optimize the amount of sales that I do. And this is a crazy black box for retailers today, because they don't actually know what their stores look like. Because how would they know? Right? Someone at headquarters might have made a plan. It's called a planogram of here's how we want the store to look. But how sure are they that the store actually looks that way? It turns out that the store managers are not very good at following those plans. Also because the plans aren't, you know, they don't think they're good, right? Like I know my store well. I've run out of this, I'm gonna put something else in this spot. And then it turns out that when I put something else in that spot, I was selling more of it. So I'm gonna keep it there now, but I'm not telling headquarters about it. And, you know, globally, maybe like 60% planogram compliance across retailers, which means that all of these analytics teams working at retail companies are working with absolute garbage data.

SPEAKER_00 57:32

Yeah, especially in China. Sorry to interrupt, but I I also always tell you like I go to the supermarket next to our office and the water is on the right aisle, second aisle, and then I go tomorrow and everything is different. They love to just throw things around. So yeah, and and uh I think in China you will have an even bigger market to do this, right?

SPEAKER_02 57:54

Indeed, right? So um the value prop was just hey, we're gonna tell your humans and your AI systems and your analytics systems what your store actually looks like. We're gonna do robotic vision using this little robot with no arms and legs that you already have in your pocket. Um and that will allow you to get AR navigation for your staff and for your shoppers. It's actually a bigger deal for the staff than for the shoppers, believe it or not. Because there's such high staff turnover in retail, and it takes a long time to train train people up. We found that we could reduce the walking distance for the staff members by 25 to 45% for our biggest customer that already had some kind of navigation system just because we had better data about where the products actually are. Right. So you make your workers more productive. Uh, there's actually American research that indicates that 6% of baskets would contain at least one more item if the staff were more knowledgeable about where the products are. Right. Um, so yeah, you get AR navigation, you get an actual accurate understanding of where the products are, and you get an augmented reality task manager so that the store manager can leave tasks asynchronously to people. We found that just that uh shaves off 15 minutes uh per employee per day, just on handovers, just on handovers, right? And now we're gonna use the robots to populate that same augmented reality task manager. So we're putting robots into stores this year that are just gonna drive around the stores, look at the store, and find out what needs to get done. It's a store manager robot, not a store worker robot. So the humans will still be doing, it's not taking any human's job. The store manager is gonna keep their job for sure, right? But all the human workers will have a better understanding of what needs to get done and probably a better relationship to work as well, because now it's not their asshole manager telling them what to do. It's the AI telling them what to do, which is you know, probably a better feeling. So, yeah, we're we're uh looking to deploy several hundred of those perception-based store manager robots uh this year. So, yeah, we're uh at AUKI, we're focusing a lot on retail this year, but uh other people building on the real world web, like uh Budbreak, the agricultural robotics uh company, uh they're doing robots that help detect crop-destroying diseases in vineyards uh so that farmers will not lose so many grapes uh every year. Um there's a lot of interesting stuff happening on the on the real world web.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:35

Uh so yeah, this this sounds very theoretical to me still. Like, how do you actually onboard if if you have this deal? Um, how do you start the project with the retailer?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:47

So the the retailers uh either print or receive uh markers that are like road signs for robots that they start placing around their store. Then they film the uh venue using their own phones and their own staff. They upload the video, and the video will contain these markers. In fact, we have a special video recording app that instructs them to like, okay, let's find one marker, now let's find another marker, let's find overlapping markers. So like a little copilot that teaches you how to film the store the right way. And then you upload that video to the real world web where it gets analyzed by an AI and turned into a map. So essentially they place markers, they film the store, they upload the video, and that's how they get a map.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:40

Do they have already robots now working?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:43

No, we're gonna deploy the first robots in in Q2 this year.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:47

Okay. And why do you why is it a European retailer and not a Chinese one?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:54

Um I think it it was a Guanxi thing. Okay. Uh kinda. Uh our head of sales is Swedish and uh lives in Sweden and met another Swedish retail startup at a conference, and that retail startup had Sweden's largest retailer as a customer and knew that they were looking for something like what we were doing. Um, so that that's how. But I think uh yeah, there there are very big opportunities in in China, uh, but it's also a very tough landscape. And as a foreigner, you still have to be a little bit careful. You need to make sure you have good partners in mainland China so your your things don't get just copied and stolen. So we've kind of been holding off on uh going into the mainland Chinese market until we have stronger partners, better relationship with the robot OEMs, which we have now, some some good heavy name Chinese investors, things like this, to just protect ourselves a little bit. The earth is a big place, you know, there are plenty of retail opportunities outside of China. Uh, but obviously we want to be a global company. Obviously, China is an important part of our strategy. Uh, we just thought it was best to be a little bit careful until we've developed the right kind of muscle to be successful here.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:20

And you you've built and made business with the US, with Europe, with China. Where do you see the biggest difference and how they approach AI and robotics in these three different markets?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:36

I really appreciate how open and collaborative the Chinese ecosystem is. Uh, there's a lot of open source, there's a lot of cross-contamination, like people talk pretty openly, gossip, pagwa across the companies. Uh so there's a lot of information traveling between companies, meaning companies learn faster together and the ecosystem moves faster. Whereas the Western companies are quite secretive, so they don't learn as much from each other, which I I think is is slowing them down. Like one of the great things about Shenzhen, as a guy named uh Mehti pointed out uh on X recently, is just the information landscape here. When you have so many different manufacturers in walking distance from each other, um things like price discovery, process discovery, all of these things just happen super, super quick. And information propagates in the ecosystem much better. I was at a um closed doors VIP dinner for the robotics industry about half a year ago in Shanghai, and one of the world's largest robot OEMs made the joke that hey, Americans don't buy robots because they have immigrants. And the point of that joke was not to make fun of immigrants or Americans even. It was in the context of I was asking why is it so hard to buy your robots outside of China? Why are the wait times so long? And the explanation was European and American companies are so slow at making decisions, it takes them months to years to decide to buy one robot. So it never makes sense for us to have stock overseas because the companies here make decisions in days to weeks. So every new robot we build, the smartest thing to do is to keep it in a Chinese warehouse because chances are we'll sell it tomorrow. So because European and American businesses are so slow at making decisions, there's no stock, no replacement parts, no like the the Chinese manufacturers. Manufacturers don't bother keeping the same level of service because it just doesn't make sense because we're so slow at making decisions. But after I had lived in Beijing for seven years, I went back to Sweden for six months. Sweden is where I was born. I went back to Sweden for six months and did some consulting. And I noticed something about European and Western work culture that I hadn't noticed before I was taken out of it, which is how are meetings scheduled? Right. So in Beijing, it's like uh I'm talking to the CEO of so-and-so, and like, hey, here's something I think we should do together. And it's like, okay, let's meet tonight, let's meet tomorrow. Or you just figure it out on we chat. Right. And everything in Sweden was like, yes, yes, let's have a meeting about this in two weeks. Yeah. Why? What are you doing for two weeks? Like, what are you doing? Like, I know you're not busy. Why don't we just go for dinner tonight? Right? Like, even working at the same company, you know, is like, hey, here's something that we really should fix. Like, we need to do an overhaul on the website or something. Like, yes, yes, let's do it. Let's book a meeting about this for Thursday.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:14

I mean, we're already right. Can we just fix it right now? Um, that sense of urgency is just, I think, pathologically missing in the West. Um, people talk about a lot about like JoJo Leo, like long working hours. I don't think that's it at all. I think just the sense of urgency and how quickly uh decisions are made in Asia and in China in particular is what has made this place be so successful.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:45

They fucking make decisions. Yeah, we talked about it earlier, right? Yeah, about the concept of developing countries and developed countries. Uh it's uh people getting so comfortable with what they achieved in the past, especially in Europe, that they don't see the urge of doing something, so they get really, really slow.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:04

Yeah. I mean, I contacted you two or three days ago, and I said, Do you have time for a podcast? We have a free spot. And I like we had we have like um we booked the studio like for six spots, and when we arrived here, we had like two filled, but I was not worried at all that I would get great guests with great stories because if I would contact you two or three weeks ago, what are you doing in two or three weeks? You'd say, Well, I don't know. Who knows? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:29

The same with all the robotic companies, like, oh yeah, we we plan the trip in in May, and then yeah, let's let's fix it maybe one week earlier.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:39

There's a uh a German robotics influencer on X that wanted to do some kind of yeah, interview or something with me. And it was again this like, yeah, let's have a meeting about it in three weeks. Yeah, right. Like I gave him my calendar and he booked something. Three weeks. But he is in Germany. Yeah, he's in Germany. Yeah, sure, come visit my lab. Absolutely. When do you want to come? I'm thinking like August or September. It's like it's lose my numbers.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:12

So, how can we hub Europe? We as Europeans, it's not that we just want to talk shit about Europe, but I honestly hope that Europe can find its place in this world. And if we have AI, if we have robotics, it doesn't seem right now that uh Europe is playing an important role between US and China.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:33

Europe just needs to make a decision to get its act together. And I think it starts with learning how to make decisions, right? Stop having decision paralysis. So, what you were referencing uh earlier about uh developed nations was I I I was out having drinks in San Francisco with um Elvis Nava, who is the CTO of Mimic Robotics in Switzerland, uh, one of the better funded European uh robotics labs. And he made this great observation that it was a mistake, like mimetically, it was a mistake to introduce this term developing country and developed country, because we started calling ourselves developed countries many, many decades ago. And it did something to our psyche that made us think that we are on top and we don't need to improve. And I was like, oh, China's a developing country, but it's also ahead of us. It's like what does that mean when the person on top is developing and you're not, right? Like Europe has gone stagnant, and a lot of it, I think, is just this missing sense of urgency. We've gotten incredibly comfortable, yeah, we're not motivated, um, we don't aspire, we don't look outside to the world and see how much better things could be. I find you know, my home country of Sweden to be very low on motivation, very low on action and agency. And these are cultural problems that we can fix with better memes, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:05

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:05

We have to inspire ourselves to want to accomplish more. We have to make it okay to strive for success, which I think is something that in Sweden in particular is a little bit frowned upon. Uh and you haven't been to Germany. We can sing a song of that.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:22

That's also one of the reasons why I just left and decided, okay, I can spend most of my time here working at a company, get a good salary, but I don't have the feeling that I really earn what I'm doing. And that is something that most of the people, also in my close friends, they're like, I like it this way. Like, okay, good.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:45

That explains a lot. I I feel the same. I I want to earn my bread, you know, I want to know that I'm doing something that's contributing to society. Yeah. I was going crazy working at these European companies where like nothing ever happens and decision making is so slow, and you're talking about like, oh, we have a very flat hierarchy. No, you just have decision paralysis. It's not a flat hierarchy, it's that everything becomes a fucking committee.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:10

Yeah, doing a meeting for a meeting because we want to have a meeting in two weeks. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:17

It's crazy. Europe and the US need to learn how to take some risk. Uh, I'm releasing a new article this week called Move Fast and Break Robots, which is about this, right? So move fast and break things has been one of these mantras uh for software in Silicon Valley. You know, it's basically this idea that the only way a startup can compete with a bigger company is by learning things faster. Time to insight is like the most sacred KPI for a startup. Like, how fast can we learn? Can we learn faster than these bigger companies that you know it's gonna take two weeks just to book a meeting to discuss what happened in the sales call and blah, blah, blah. And don't be afraid to break something, because when you break something, you learn from that too, right? So move fast and break things. You know, Elon Musk, not afraid to blow up some rockets on his way to Mars, right? Move fast and break things. But for some reason, Western VCs are terrified of the idea of spending money on robots because they're like, what if they break? Yeah. Yeah, what if? Don't you want to learn under what circumstances the robots break, right? Don't you want to build up that muscle? If I went to a Western VC and I said, like, hey, I'm gonna spend a million dollars on a compute experiment, like I have I have a new world model architecture. Maybe it'll go somewhere, maybe it won't, but we're gonna spend a million dollars of compute to run that experiment. They'll go like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. And if I go like, hey, I'm gonna spend a million dollars on a new generation of Chinese robots that I think are capable of doing this task, like that's crazy. Why are you gonna spend a million dollars? Well, you know, because if I'm right, the upside is billions and billions of dollars. But like, yeah, but what if it breaks? Like, yeah, what if my uh LLM experiment doesn't work? Right? There's this weird blind spot in the Western psyche about spending money on hardware, uh you know, some learned trauma from the hardware winters of before that we just need to get over. You have to be willing to break some robots, right? I accidentally broke uh $10,000 worth of robot hands in a few seconds once because we had these, you know, nice, I think they're $8,000, something like that, the hands, and we'd attached them to our humanoid robot, and then the humanoid robot had just received a software upgrade from Unitry, and now it could do some new dance. It's like, hey, let's look at the new dance just for fun. The thing was that dance was not calibrated for the weight of the hands, right? Which meant the movement was off by just a little little bit. So he smashed his hands into his thighs and the hands just shattered, right? Boom, $10,000 gone. And now we've learned something very, very valuable, right? That I would very willingly pay some, you know, a consultant $10,000 to tell us, you know, like hey, hey, uh, these like motion policies are actually very, very sensitive to weight. So, you know, um like we we learned a lot of very valuable things in those few seconds of robot dancing, seeing the pieces of hands fly all over. And you're not gonna learn that at the whiteboard. And and if you're trying to learn it at the whiteboard, it's gonna cost you more than $10,000.

unknown 1:15:44

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:45

Yeah, for sure. And I always see people like commenting on these videos on Instagram where robots do something wrong, they stumble, or they they do some and and people are ha ha ha, this is the future. But then I said you people they don't understand that this is actually learning, it's not failing. And they're failing now, but uh the learning they have in five or ten years will be so valuable for them.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:08

Yeah. Yeah. Imagine looking at uh like computer games in the mid-90s and being like, haha, these don't look realistic at all. The physics are so buggy. Haha, when a when a car collides with another car, it'll fly up in the air. Computers are so stupid, and yeah, okay. But then a few years later, the computer game industry was bigger than Hollywood and music combined.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:30

Yeah, right. Just it's the same with the LLMs also. Like in the beginning, everybody was like, Oh yeah, Chat GPT is good because it uh it just helps me to maybe rewrite something, and then in the end, it it's not able to calculate one plus one. And now, like only a year later, it's part of it, it's only is already developing itself. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:53

Yeah, also the the meme that went viral. Don't know if you saw it on LinkedIn, then people asking their LLM, uh, I want to wash my car, but the car wash is just 500 meters away, and then the LMM said, No, no, just walk there. And then ah, so stupid.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:09

But this is so dangerous. Like, it gives people that are against technology and changes the good feeling, or at least what they feel in that very moment is like, oh, I have this good feeling, okay. This is too far away, it's too stupid right now. I don't have to deal with this now because it's it's not gonna happen. So they get again super comfortable and like uh lean back. No, it's it's not worth to spend my time looking at it because obviously somebody supports my theory that it's bad.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:37

We live in history, actually. That that that was the thing that made me stay in Beijing. I I went to visit Beijing for three months and ended up staying seven years because I realized when I arrived in Beijing that we are still living in history. History is still happening. And growing up in Europe, I was raised to believe that we lived in post-history, right? Like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, history is done. We now live in the new stable world order and we are developed countries and blah, blah. No, we live in history and we live at the very foot of an exponential takeoff, and you need to really embrace the idea that change is coming very, very quickly, and history is changing, civilization is changing, the universe is changing, and you can either choose to be an agent of change and make decisions and exercise your agency and have an impact on history, or you can get replaced by people that are trying to change the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:39

Nothing to add to that, right? Thank you so much. This was amazing. Thank you guys. Good closing. Um, yeah, we are very excited to see what the future brings and what uh you bring to the world.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:52

Let's uh let's start deploying some robots. Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:56

I'll love to see them at your lab.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:58

Yeah, come visit.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:59

Sure.