YouSaid · the spoken record

Boris Sofman

lines on the record: 198
first: 2021-11-16
most recent: 2021-11-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Like, you know, when I'm working on that, I can easily go to kind of an extreme, and now I'm trying to kind of find that balance and make sure that I have the friendships, the family, like relationship with the kids, everything that I don't, I push really, really hard, but kind of find a balance. And I think people can be happy on actually many kind of extremes on that spectrum, but it's easy to kind of inadvertently make a choice by how you approach it that then becomes really hard to unwind. And so being very thoughtful about kind of all those dimensions makes a lot of sense. And so those are all interrelated. But at the end of the day,”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the growth creates opportunities where the surface area is just going to increase, and the problems will never get stale. And you can have, and so you go into a career where you have that sort of growth in the world that you're in, you end up having so much more opportunity that organically just appears. And you can then have more shots on gold to find that killer overlap of timing and passion and skill set and point in life where you can just really be motivated and fall in love with something. And then at the same time, like find a balance. Like, there's been times in my life where I worked like a little bit too obsessively and crazy. And I think we kind of like tried to correct that, you know, kind of the right opportunities. But, you know, I think I probably appreciate a lot more now friendships that go way back, you know, family and things like that. And I kind of have the personality where I could have so much desire to really try to optimize.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, you know, I mean, like, because it's like that's a beautiful thing where you can do what you love, but it also just opens up tons of opportunities because the world's ready for it, right? And so if you're interested in technology, that might point to like, go and study machine learning because you don't have to decide what career you're going to go into, but it's going to be such a versatile space that's going to be at the root of like everything that's going to be in front of us that you can have eight different careers in different industries and be an absolute expert in this like kind of tool set that you wield that can go and be applied. And that, by the way, that doesn't apply to just technology, right? It could be the exact same thing if you want to same thought process applies to design to marketing to sales to anything. But that versatility where you like when you're in a space that's going to continue to grow, it's just like, what company do you join? One that just is going to.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very good question. So it's very hard to go into a space that you're not passionate about and push hard enough to be, you know, maximize your potential in it. And so there's always kind of like the saying of like, okay, follow your passion. Great. Try to find the overlap of where your passion overlaps with a growing opportunity and need in the world where it's not too different than the startup kind of argument that we talked about, where if you are where you're passionate.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go and have this huge, huge ramp into the entirety of Aerobotics and so forth. But they both do a really great business in a vacuum cleaner world. And like everybody understands what a vacuum cleaner is. Most people are annoyed by doing it. And now you have one that kind of does it itself. Various degrees of quality, but that is so compelling that it's easier to understand and they had a very kind of, and I think they have like 15% of the vacuum cleaner market. So it's like pretty successful, right? I think we need more of those. Hardware is cheaper, computes cheaper, clouds cheaper, and AI is better. So there's a lot of opportunity.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so then you really have to be crisp about the value proposition and what really makes it worth it. And we, by the way, went to that same wonder. We almost hit a wall coming out of 2013 where we were so big on explaining why our stuff was so high tech and all the kind of like great technology in it and how cool it is and so forth to having to make a super hard pivot on why is it fun and why does the random kind of family of you know four need this right like so you know it's learnings but that's that's the challenge and i think like robotics tends to sometimes fall into the new category problem but then you got to be really crisp about why it needs to exist”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Susceptible to this because if you can argue a queer value proposition, it's a more logical conversation that you can have with customers. It's a little bit less emotional and kind of subjective.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We struggle. We spent a lot of money on marketing. We had a hard, like we actually had far greater efficiency on Cosmo than anything else because we found a way to capture the emotion in some little shorts to kind of wean into the personality in our marketing. And it became viral where like we had these kind of videos that would go and get like hundreds of thousands of views and like kind of like get spread and sometimes millions of views. And so, but it was really, really hard. And so finding a way to kind of like anchor on something that's familiar but then grow into something that's not is an advantage. But then again, like you don't have like there's successes otherwise. Like Alexa never had a comp, right? You could argue that that's very novel and very new. And there's a lot of other examples that kind of created kind of a category out of Akiva systems. I mean, they came in and they enterprises are a little easier because if you can, it's”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nest had some beautiful products where they started scaling and like actually find really great success. And they had like really clean and beautiful marketing messaging because they anchored on reinventing existing categories where it was a smart thermostat, right? And so you kind of are able to take what's familiar anchor that understanding and then explain what's better about it. That's funny.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that was intentionally sending a message, something familiar, but then like. Can send a text message, you can listen to music, you can strip the web, right? And so autonomous driving obviously anchors on that as well. You don't have to explain to somebody the functionality of an autonomous truck, right? Like there's nuances around it, but the functionality makes sense. In the home. Have a fundamental advantage like we always thought about this because it was so painful to explain to people what our products did and how to communicate that super cleanly, especially when something was so experiential. And so you compare”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having a foot and a door in an entry point still helps because at the end of the day, like an iPhone replaced your phone. And so it had a fundamental purpose and all these things that it did better, right? And so then you could do ABC on top of it. And then you even remember the early commercials where it was always like one application of what it could do, and then you get a phone call.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The size of the market, the size of the target audience, the ability to capture that market share, how hard that's going to be, who the incumbent's like. That's probably one of the lessons I appreciate more than anything else, where those things really, really do matter. And oftentimes can dominate the quality of the team or execution because if you miss the timing or you do it in the wrong space or you run into like the institutional kind of headwinds of a particular environment, like let's say you have the greatest idea in the world, but you barrow into healthcare, but it takes 10 years to innovate in healthcare because of a lot of challenges, right? Like there's fundamental laws of physics that you have to think about. And so the combination of like Anki Wemo kind of drives that point home for me where you can do a ton if you have the right market, the right opportunity, the right way to explain it, and you show the progress in the right sequence, it actually can really significantly change the course of your journey in startup.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You come at it thinking that if you're smart enough and you work hard enough and you like have the right talented team and so forth, you'll always kind of find a way through. And it's so Has raised and continues to spend so much money at such an early phase of revenue generation and productization from a P&L standpoint, it's anomaly by any measure of any industry that's ever existed, except for maybe the US space program, right? It's like a... Multiple trillion dollar opportunities, which is so unusual at the finite size of a market that just the progress that shows the de-risking of it, you could apply whatever discounts you want off of that trillion dollar market and it still justifies the investment that is happening because like being successful in that space makes all the investment feel trivial. Now, by the same consequence, like”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're like disagreeing with an investor, and they're your investors. So it's just like there's no walking away from it, right? And it tends to be like those things where you just kind of get clobbered in so many different ways that things end up being harder than you expect. And it's like such a gauntlet, but you learn so much in the process. And there's a lot of people that actually end up rooting for you and helping you from the outside and you get good, great mentors and you get find fantastic people that step up in the company and you have this like magical period where everybody's like it's life or death for the company, but like you're all fighting for the same thing and it's the most satisfying kind of journey ever. The things that make it easier and that I would recommend is like be really, really thoughtful about the application. Like there's a saying of like kind of team and execution and market and like kind of how important are each of those. And oftentimes the market wins.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you come from a world in school where you feel that you put in a lot of effort and you'll get the right result and input translates proportional to output. And you need to solve this set or do whatever and you just kind of get it done. Now PhD test out a little bit, but at the end of the day, you put in the effort, you tend to kind of come out with enough results to kind of get a PhD. In the startup space, like you could talk to 50 investors and they just don't see your vision and it doesn't matter how hard you kind of tried and pitched. You could work incredibly hard and you have a manufacturing defect. And if you don't fix it, you're going to, you're out of business. You need to raise money by a certain date. And there's a, you got to have this milestone in order to like have a good pitch and you need it. You have to have this talent and you just don't have it inside the company. Or, you know, you have to get 200 people or however many people kind of like along with you and kind of buy in the journey.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the greatest experience ever, and it's like there's something you, there are things you learn navigating a startup that you'll never like, it was very hard to encounter that in like a typical kind of work environment. And it's just, it's wonderful. You got to be ready for it. It's not as good. The glamour of a startup, there's just like just brutal emotional swings up and down. And so having co-founders actually helps a ton. I cannot imagine doing it solo, but having at least somebody where on your darkest days you can kind of like really openly just like have that conversation and, you know, lean on to somebody that's in the thick of it with you helps a lot. What I would say.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gigantic challenges that have been successful and are way more mature, there's a stability to it. And maybe the autonomous vehicle space will get there. But right now, just as many technical challenges as they are, they're like organizational challenges. And how do you solve these problems that touch on so many different areas and efficiently tackle them while maintaining progress among all these constraints while scaling?”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Memory this, there's that, there's caching. And there's a really reasonably well established modularity in APIs and so forth. And so you can kind of scale it in an efficient fashion. That doesn't exist anywhere near to that level of maturity in autonomous driving right now. Tech stacks are being reinvented, organizational structures are being reinvented. You have problems like pedestrians that are not isolated problems. They're part sensing, part behavior prediction, part planning, part evaluation. Like one of the biggest challenges is actually how do you solve these problems where the mental capacity of a human is starting to get strained on how do you organize it and think about it where you have this like multidimensional matrix that needs to all work together. And so that makes it kind of cool as well because it's not like solved at all from, you know, like what is it to actually scale this, right? And then you look at like.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of purity of passion. You got to remember that, like, right now, robotics and AI is like all the rage and autonomous vehicles and all this. Like 15 years ago and 20 years ago, it wasn't that deeply lucrative. People that went into robotics, they did it because they were like thought it was just the coolest thing in the world to like make physical things intelligent in the real world. And so there's like a raw passion where they went into it for the right reasons and so forth. And so it's a really great space. And that organizational challenge, by the way, like when you think about the challenges in AV, we talk a lot about the technical challenges. The organizational challenges through the roof where you think about the what it takes to build an AV system and you have companies that are now thousands of people. And you look at other really hard technical problems like an operating system. It's pretty well established. Like you kind of know that there's a file system, there's virtual.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so what I think is like the beauty of robotics, but also kind of like the expectation is that there's spaces and computers. One of the necessity, but also the beauty of it is that it forces you to be excited about that breadth and that partnership across different disciplines that enable it. But that also opens up so many more doors where you can go and you can do robotics in almost any category where robotics isn't really an industry. It's like AI, right? It's like the application of physical automation to all these other worlds. And so you can do robotic surgery. You can do vehicles. You can do factory automation. You can do healthcare. You can do like leverage the AI around the sensing to think about static sensors and understanding. So I think that's got to be the expectation and the excitement. And it breeds people that are probably a little bit more collaborative and more excited about working in teams.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so like forest ditches, rocks, vegetation. And so it was like a really, really interesting kind of a hard problem where wheels would be up to my shoulders. It's like gigantic, right?”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was working on a project called UPI back then, which was basically the off-road version of the DARPA challenge. It was a DARPA-funded project for basically like a large off-road vehicle that you would drop and then give it away point 10 kilometers away and it would have to navigate a completely unstructured”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it means being able to collaborate with teams where one of the coolest aspects of the experience that I kind of cherish in our PhD is that we actually had a pretty large AV project that for that time was like a pretty serious initiative where you got to partner with a larger team and you had the experts in perception and the experts in planning and the staff and the mechanical percentage.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Evolve and change as technology changes and constraints change and hardware changes and the world changes. And so the beautiful thing about robotics is it's super broad. It's not a narrow space at all and it can be a million different things in a million different industries. And so it's a great opportunity to come in and get a broad foundation on AI, machine learning, computer vision, systems, hardware, sensors, all these separate things. You do need to like go deep and find something that you're really, really passionate about obviously like just like any PhD this is like a five, six year kind of endeavor and you have to love it enough to go super deep to learn all the things necessary to be super deeply functioning in that area and then contribute to it in a way that hasn't been done before. And in robotics, that probably means more breadth because robotics is rarely kind of like one particular kind of narrow technology.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I asked you what I was a CMU for undergrad as well and didn't know anything about robotics coming in and was doing electrical computer engineering, computer science and really got more and more into kind of AI and then fell in love with autonomous driving. And at that point, that was just by a big margin, like such an incredible central spot of investment in that area. And so what I would say is that robotics, like for all the progress that's happened is still a really young field. There's a huge amount of opportunity. Now that opportunity shifted where something like autonomous driving has moved from being very research and academics driven to being commercial driven where you see the investments happening in commercial. Now there's other areas that are much younger and you see like kind of grasping an emulation, making kind of the same sort of journey that like autonomy made and there's other areas as well. What I would say is the space moves very quickly. Anything you do a PhD in like it is in most areas will”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And you start to think of it as an end to end robotics problem from loading from everything. And even the truck itself, today's generation is integrating into today's understanding of what a vehicle is, right? A Pacifica Jaguar, the freight liners from Daimler, there's nothing that stops us from down the road after starting to get to scale to expand these partnerships to really rethink what would the next generation of a truck look like that is actually optimized for autonomy, not for today's world. And maybe that means a very different type of trailer. Maybe that, like, there's a lot of things you could rethink on that front, which is on its own very, very exciting.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there is a magic. So I'm absolutely amazed at it from a technical curiosity standpoint. And like the magic that the Boston Dynamics team can do from walking and jumping and so forth. There's been a long journey to try to find an application for that sort of technology, but wow, that's incredible technology, right? Yes. So then you kind of go towards okay, are you working back from a goal of what you're trying to solve or are you working forward from a technology and then looking for solution? And I think that's where it's a kind of a bi-directional search oftentimes, but you got to, the two have to meet. And that's where humanoid robots is kind of close to that in that like it is a decision about a form factor and a technology that it forces that doesn't have a clear justification on why that's the killer app from the other end.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interfaces for robotic kind of characters and kind of deployments in these applications that do not at all look like a human directly, but that actually creates way more flexibility and capability and role in forgiveness and interface and everything else.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for the factory environment, like right off the bat, what are you optimizing for? Is it strength? Is it mobility? Is it versatility? That changes completely the look and feel of the robot that you create. And almost certainly the human form is overdesigned for some dimensions and constrained for some dimensions. And so what are you grasping? Is it big? Is it little? Right. So you would customize it and make it customizable for the different needs if that was the optimization, right? And then for the other one, I could totally be wrong. I still feel that the closer you try to get to a human, the more you're subject to the biases of what a human should be. And you lose flexibility to shift away from your weaknesses and towards your strengths. And that changes over time, but there's ways to make really approachable natural.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How crazy it is? I just like, you know, I'll pay attention. I'm curious to see what comes out of it. So it's like you can't ever ignore it. But it's definitely far afield from their kind of core business, obviously”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think today humanoid form robotics is research. There's very few situations where you actually need a humanoid form to solve a problem. If you think about it, right? Like wheels are more efficient than legs. There's joints and degrees of freedom beyond a certain point just add a lot of complexity and cost, right? So if you're doing a humanoid robot, oftentimes it's in the pursuit of a humanoid robot, not in the pursuit of an application for the time being. Especially when you have kind of the gaps and interface and AI that we kind of talk about today. So anything, Joan does I'm interested in following. So there's an element of that where”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something, yeah, like the new generation UX, right? And it's tough. And oftentimes all of them have to be there. And it has to be like a perfect storm. But yeah, history repeats itself in a lot of ways in a lot of these trends, which is pretty fascinating.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it's just a timing thing, right? Where how many stabs at what became the iPhone where they're over the 20 years before that just weren't quite ready in the function relative to the kind of price point and complexity?”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's It's not constant, right? And that's why we picked off entertainment because. The quality was just so low in physical entertainment that we felt we could leapfrog that and still create a really compelling offering at a price point that was defensible. And that proved out to be true. Over time, that same opportunity opens up in healthcare, in home applications, in commercial applications, in kind of broader, more generalized interface. And all of those have to be present for it to line up. And we see these sort of trends in technology where technologies that start in one place evolve and kind of grow to another, something starting gaming, something start in space or aerospace and then kind of moving to the consumer market.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bar is very, very high, and typically robotics is novel enough and non standardized enough to where pushes on price points so much that you can easily get out of range where the capabilities in today's technology are just a function that was picked just doesn't line up. And so that product market fit is very important.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have not only do you have to hit the function, but you have to educate and explain, get awareness up, deal with different types of consumers. There's a reason why a lot of technologies sometimes start in the enterprise space and then kind of continue forward in the consumer space. Even like, you know, you see AR starting to kind of make that shift with hollow ends and so forth in some ways consumers and price points that they're willing to kind of be attracted in a mass market way. And I don't mean like, you know, 10,000 enthusiasts bought it, but I mean like. 2 million, 10 million, 50 million like mass market kind of interest have bought it.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A robot's impressive because they found a really, really great fit of where the technology could satisfy a really clear used case in need. And they did it well and they didn't try to overshoot from a cost-to-benefit standpoint. Robotics is hard because it tends to be more expensive. It combines way more technologies than a lot of other types of companies do. If I were to say one thing that is maybe the biggest risk in a robotics company failing is that it can be either a technology in search of a application or they try to fight off a kind of an offering that has a mismatch and kind of price to function. And just the mass market appeal isn't there. And consumer products are just hard. After all the years in it, like definitely kind of feel a lot of the battle scars because”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have deep pockets so you can. Yeah, and that way we have more misfires than an apple would, but it's different styles and different approaches. And at the end of the day, it's like there's a few familiar kind of elements there for sure, which was.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly right. And so I think they also have to retrace some of the warnings on the character side where as usual, I think that's the place where a lot of companies are great at the hardware side of it and can think about those elements. And then there's like, you know, the thinking about the AI challenges, particularly with the advantage of Alexis, is a pretty huge boost for them. The character side of it for technology companies is pretty novel territory. And so that will take some iterations. Yeah, I mean, I hope this continued progress in the space and that thread doesn't kind of go dormant for too long. And it's not, you know, it's going to take a while to kind of evolve into the ideal applications. But this is one of Amazon's, I guess you could call it's definitely part of their DNA, but in many cases it's also strength where they're very willing to iterate kind of aggressively and move quickly.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of what the mass market consumer. Think our neighbors, our parents, would they find a deep, deep value in this at a mass scale that justifies the price point? I think that's in the end one of the biggest challenges for robotics, especially consumer robotics, where you have to kind of meet that bar, it becomes very, very hard.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It opens up options. But my first reaction is, I think, like, I have my doubts that this one's going to hit the mark because I think for the price point that it's at and the functionality and value propositions that they're trying to put out, it's still searching for the kill application that justifies, I think it was like a $1,500 price point or kind of somewhere on there. That's a really high bar. There's enthusiasts and early adopters will obviously kind of pursue it, but you have to like really, really hit a high mark at that price point, which we always tried to, we were always very cautious about jumping too quickly to the more advanced systems that we really wanted to make, but would have raised the bar so much that you have to be able to hit it in today's cost structures and technologies. The mobility is an angle that hasn't been utilized, but it has to be utilized in the right way. And so that's going to be the biggest challenge is like, can you meet the bar?”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had some signs that they were getting into it long, long, long ago. Maybe they were a little bit too interested in Cosmo and our conversations, but they're also very good partners, actually, for us as we kind of just integrated a lot of shared technology.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, and you can't even just take it as like, okay, well, we need to subsidize or whatever, because there is an element of just personal pride where majority of people, like people don't want to just be okay, but they want to actually have a craft, like you said, and have a mission and feel like they're having a really positive impact. And so my personal belief is that there's a lot of transferability and skill set that is possible, especially if you create a bridge and an investment to enable it. Some degree, that's our responsibility as well in this process.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The growth that's enabled creates opportunities that you can then leverage, but you got to be intentional about finding those and really helping make those links. Even if you make the argument that like there's a net positive, locally there's always tough hits that you got to be very careful about.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So basically, instead of a person going and walking around and picking the seven items in your order, these robots go and pick up a shelf and move it over in a row where the seven shelves that contain the seven items are lined up and a laser or whatever points to what you need to get and you go and pick it and you place it to fill the order. And so the people are fulfilling the final orders. What was interesting about that is that when I was asking them about like kind of the impact on labor, when they transitioned that warehouse, the throughput increased so much that the jobs shifted towards the final fulfillment, even though the robots took over entirely the search of the items themselves. And the job stayed. It was actually the same amount of jobs roughly they were necessary, but the throughput increased by, I think, over 2x or some amount, right? So you have these situations that are not zero-sum games in this really interesting way. And the optimist to me thinks that there's these types of solutions in almost any industry where”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's like really elegant and beautiful way. It's actually one of my favorite applications of robotics of all time. I think I kind of came across that company like 2006. It was just amazing.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think about it because you want to make sure that you worry about the entire system, like not just the part economy plays in it, but what are the ripple effects of it down the road. And on enough of a time window, there's a lot of opportunity to put in the right policies and the right opportunities to kind of reshape and retrain and find those openings. And so just to give you a few examples, both trucking and cars, we have remote assistance facilities that are there to interface with customers and monitor vehicles and provide like very focused kind of assistance on areas where the vehicle may want to request help in understanding an environment. So those are jobs that kind of get created and supported. I remember taking a tour of one of the Amazon facilities where you've probably seen the Kiva Systems robots where you have these orange robots that have automated the warehouse kind of picking and collecting of items.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the other thing is when you increase the efficiency of a system like this, the overall net volume of the system tends to increase, right? The entire market cap of trucking is going to go up when the efficiency improves and facilitates both growth in industries and better utilization of trucking. And so that on its own just creates more and more demand, which of all the places where AI comes in and starts to really kind of reshape an industry. This is one of those where like there's just a lot of positives that for at least any time in the foreseeable future seem really lined up in a good way to kind of come in and help with the shortage and start to kind of optimize for the routes that are most dangerous and most painful.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obesity rate is through the roof because you're just sitting all day. It's really, really tough. And that's also where the biggest kind of safety risk is because of fatigue. And so when you think of the gradual evolution of how trucking comes in, first of all, it's not overnight. It's going to take decades to kind of phase in all there's just a long, long, long road ahead. The routes and the portions of trucking that are going to require humans the longest and benefit the most from humans are the short haul and most complicated kind of more urban routes which are also the more pleasant ones which are less continual driving time more flexibility on like you know geography and location and you get to kind of sleep with it at home at your own home and so and very”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's even more positive properties about trucking, where not only is there just a huge shortage which is going to increase, the average age of truck drivers is getting closer to 50 because younger people aren't wanting to come into it. They're trying to incentivize lower the age limit, like all these sort of things. And the demand is just going to increase. And the least favorable, like, I mean, it depends on the person, but in most cases, the least favorable types of routes are the massive long-haul routes where you're on the road away from your family 300 plus days a year.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source