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

“Really difficult. You can fail on almost any one of the kind of dimensions. And yeah, it takes, you know, yeah, unique convergence of a lot of different skill sets to try to pull that off. Yeah.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which will be neat. But I think it's deceptive how tricky that is on everything from Quality control, the details, and then like technology changes that forces you to reinvent and update certain things. So I haven't been super close to it, but just kind of keeping an eye on 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
“So keeping an eye, and of course, just out of curiosity and obviously just kind of careful product line, I think it's deceptive how complex it is to manufacture and evolve that product line and the amount of experiences that are required to complete the picture and be able to move that forward. And I think that's going to make it pretty hard to do something really substantial with it. It would be cool if even the product in the way it was was able to be manufactured. Again, that would honestly.”
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 the appreciation that when you really talk to a lot of the founders, everybody goes through those moments and sometimes it really is a matter of timing a little bit of luck. Like some things are just out of your control. And you get a much deeper appreciation for just the dimensionality of that challenge. But the great thing is that a lot of the team actually stayed together. And so there were actually a couple of companies that we kind of kept big chunks of the team together and we actually kind of helped align this to help people out as well. And one of them was Waymo where a majority of the AI and robotics team actually had the exact background that you would look for in like kind of AV space and was a space that a lot of us worked on in grad school. We're always passionate about and ended up maybe the time serendipitous timings from another perspective.”
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 so much like fan mail from kind of kids and parents. I actually, there was a bunch that collected in the end that I actually saved. And like I never, it was too emotional to open it and I still haven't opened it. And so I actually have this giant envelope of like a stack this much of like letters from kids and families just like every permutation you can imagine. And so planning to kind of, I don't know, maybe like a five-year some year reunion just inviting everybody over and we'll just like kind of dig into it and kind of bring back some memories. Good impact.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's everything, right? Like, how do you explain something that's like a new category to people that like how all these previous positions? And so, like. It had some of the hardest elements of if you were to pick a business, it had some of the hardest customer dynamics because like to sell a $150 product, you got to convince both the child to want it and the parents to agree that it's valuable. So you're having like this dual prong marketing challenge. You have manufacturing. You have really high precision on the components that you need. You have the AI challenges. So there were a lot of tough elements, but is this feeling where like just really great alignment of unique strength across kind of like all these different areas? Just incredible kind of character and animation team between this Carlos and there's like a character director day that came on board and really great people there. The AI side, the manufacturing, where like never missing a launch, right? And actually, you know, he kind of hit that quality was, yeah, it was heartbreaking. Here's one neat thing is like we.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Words like everybody stay at the office to like two, three in the morning, just like drinking and hanging out and telling stories and celebrating. And it was just like one of the best for many people, it was like the best kind of work experience that they had. And there was a lot of pride in what we did. And there wasn't anything obvious we could point to that like, hey, if only we had done that different, things would have been completely different. It was just like. The physics didn't line up, but the experience was pretty incredible. But it was hard. It had this feeling that there was this incredible beauty in both the technology and products and the team that there's a lot there that in the right context could have been pretty incredible. But it was emotional.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Timelines and like repayment terms and how to get like a bridge loan from an investor. It's just like level of stress that is as hardest things might be anywhere else. Come close to that where you feel that responsibility for 200 plus people, right? And so we were very transparent during our fundraise on who we're talking to, the challenges that we have, how it's going, and when things were going well, when things were tough. And so it wasn't a complete shock when it happened, but it was just very emotional where when we announced it finally that we, you know, basically were just like watching kind of like, you know, the runway and trying to kind of time it. And when we realized that like we didn't have any more outs, we wanted to like kind of wind it down, make sure that it was clean and we could like kind of take care of people the best we could. But they like broke down crying at all, you know, hands and somebody else had to step in for a bit. And like it was just very, very emotional. But the beautiful part is like, afterwards,”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tried really hard to make that transition. And yeah, we had a financing round that fell apart at the last second. And effectively, there was just no path to kind of get through that and get to the next kind of high holiday season. And so we ended up selling some of the assets and kind of winding down the company. It was brutal. I was very transparent with the company and the team while we were going through it, where actually despite how challenging that period was, very few people left. I mean, like people love the vision, the team, the culture, the like kind of chemistry and kind of what we were doing. There was just a huge amount of pride there. And we wanted to see it through. And we felt like we had a shot to kind of get through these checkpoints. We ended up, and I mean, by brutal, I mean, like literally like days of cash, like three, four different times runway, like in the year, you know, kind of before it, where you're like playing games of chicken on negotiating credit line.”
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 was not a business that is recurring kind of month to month unpredictable. And it's just, and then you're walking in, you're forecast in July, maybe August, if you're lucky. And it's also like very hit driven and seasonal where like you don't have the sort of continued kind of slow growth like you do in some other consumer electronics industries. And so before then, like hardware kind of went out of favor too. And so you had Fitbit and GoPro drop from 10 billion revenue to 1 billion revenue and hardware companies are getting valued at like 1x revenue oftentimes, which is tough, right? And so we effectively kind of got caught in the middle where we were trying to quickly evolve out of entertainment and move into some other categories, but you can't let go of that business because like that's what your valued on, that's what you're raising money on. But there was no path to kind of pure profitability just there because it was such a specific type of price points and so forth. And so we.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those swings became because you'd have to spend tens of millions of dollars on inventory, tens of millions of dollars on marketing and tens of millions of dollars on payroll 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
“Q4 because it was a present and it was expensive to market it and explain it and so forth. And even though the volume was really sizable and reviews were really fantastic, forecasting and planning for it and managing a cash operations was just brutal. Like it was absolutely brutal. You don't think about this when you're starting a company or when you have a few million and revenue because it's just your biggest costs are kind of just your headcount and operations and everything's ahead of you. But we got to a point where if you look at the entire year, you have to operate your company, pay all the people and so forth. You have to pay for the manufacturing, the marketing, and everything else to do your sales in mostly November, December, and then get paid in December, January by retailers. And those swings were pretty rough and just made it so difficult because the more success we became, the more wild.”
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 tough. That was a really emotional stretch, and it was a really tough year, like about a year ahead of that was actually a pretty brutal stretch because we were kind of life or death on many, many moments, just navigating these insane kind of just ups and downs and barriers. And the thing that made it so rewinding a tiny bit, like what ended up being really challenging about it as a business where is from a commercial standpoint and customer reception standpoint, there's a lot of things you could point to that were like pretty big successes. So millions of units. Got to pretty serious revenue, like close to 100 million annual revenue, number one kind of product and kind of various categories. But it was pretty expensive, ended up being very seasonal where something like 85% of our volume was in.”
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 that wouldn't surprise me at all. And, like, what's going to be different in another five years or 10 years or whatnot? Physical component cost will continue to come down in price. And mobile devices and computations are going to become more and more prevalent as well as cloud as a big tool to offload cost. AI is going to be a massive transformation compared to what we dealt with, where everything from voice understanding to just kind of broader contextual understanding and mapping of semantics and understanding scenes and so forth. And then the character side will continue to kind of progress as well because that magic does exist. It just exists in different forms. And you have just the brilliance of the tapping and animation and these other areas where that was a big unlock in film, obviously. And so I think, yeah, the pieces can...”
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 now, I don't see anybody that has picked up on where kind of Cosmo left off and is pushing on it in the same way. And so I don't know if it's the sort of thing where similar to like how in dot-com there were all these concepts that we considered that didn't work out or failed or were too early or whatnot. And then 20 years later, you have these incredible successes on almost the same concept. It might be that sort of thing where there's another pass at it that happens in five years or in 10 years. It does feel like that appreciation of that like the three-wheeled stool, if you will, between the hardware, the AI, and the character, that balance, it's hard to, I'm not aware of anywhere right now where like that same kind of aggressive drive with the value on the character is happening.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intelligence. I think so. And it's about intelligent kind of constraints, right? And just you set expectations and constraints such that in the space that's left, you can be successful. And so you can do that by having a very focused domain that you can operate in. For example, you're a customer support agent for a particular product and you create intelligence and a good interface around that or kind of in the personal companionship side, you can't be everything to across the board, you kind of solve those constraints. And I think it's possible. My worries.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People interpret what they want to interpret. And an eight year old might get a very different interpretation than a 40 year old, but you create a dynamic range. And so you can lean into these advantages much more in something that doesn't resemble human. And so that'll come faster. I don't know when a human like that's just still just complete RD at this point. The chat interfaces are getting way more interesting and richer, but it's still a long way to go to kind of pass the test of, you know.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question So I think the idea of a different type of character, like more closer to like kind of a pet style companionship, would come way faster. And there's a few reasons. One is to do something like in her, that's effectively almost general AI and the bar is so high that if you miss it by bit, you hit the uncanny value where it just becomes creepy and not appealing. Because the closer you try to get to a human in form and interface and voice, the harder it becomes. Whereas you have way more flexibility on still landing a really great experience if you embrace the idea of a character. And that's why One of the other reasons why we didn't have a voice and also why like a lot of video game characters like Sims, for example, does not have a voice when you think about it. It wasn't just a cost savings for them. It was actually for all of these purposes. It was because when you have a voice, you immediately narrow down the appeal to some particular demographic or age range or kind of style or gender. If you don't have a voice,”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An understanding of intent where, like, well, he's looking at me, he can see me. If he's not looking at me, he can't see me. Right? So it's almost like you're communicating intent. And with that intent, people are kind of a more understanding in commerce. It's interesting. It was just the earliest kind of version of starting to experiment with this, but it wasn't enabler. Links into society and a potential building block of future experiences.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or customer, do we have any complaints beyond a really casual kind of question? And it was because of the character where when a conversation came up, it was almost like, well, of course he has to see and hear. How else is he going to be alive and interacting with you? And it completely disarmed this like fear of technology that enabled this interaction to be much more fluid. And again, like entertainment was a proving ground, but that is like, you know, there's like ingredients there that carry over to a lot of other elements down the road.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I remember correctly, but like we were, we went pretty aggressively in launching Germany and France and UK. And we were very worried in Europe because there's obviously like a really socially higher bar for privacy and security where you've heard about how many companies have had troubles on things that might have been okay in the US but like are just not okay in Germany and France in particular. And so we were worried about this because you have Cosmo who's in our future product vector like where you have cameras, you have microphones that's cloud connected and like you're playing with kids and like in these experiences and you're like, this is like ripe to be like a nightmare if you're not careful. And a journalist or like notoriously really, really tough on these sort of things. We were shocked and we prepared so much for what we would have to encounter. We were shocked in that not once for many journalists.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People will never tolerate an Alexa or a Google Home just starting a conversation proactively when you weren't kind of expecting it because it feels weird. It's like you were listening and like and then now you're kind of it feels intrusive but if you had a character like a cat that touches you and gets your attention or a toddler like you never think twice about it what we found really kind of immediately is that these types of characters like Cosmo and they would like roam around and kind of get your attention. And we had a future version that was always on kind of called vector. People were way more forgiving. And so you could initiate interaction in a way that is not acceptable for machines. And in general, there's a lot of ways to customize it, but it makes people who are skeptical of technology much more comfortable with it. There was like, there were a couple of really, really prominent examples of this. So when we launched in Europe, and so we were in, I think like a dozen countries.”
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, it's a great question. And part of it was the recognition that it's going to take time to get there because it has to be a lot more intelligent because what's good enough to be a magical experience for an eight-year-old, it's a higher bar to do that like a pet in the home or to help with functional interface in an office environment or in a home or so forth. And so the idea was that you build on that and you kind of get there and as technology becomes more prevalent and less expensive and so forth you can start to kind of work up to it. But you're absolutely right at the end of the day. We almost equated it to how the touchscreen created like this really novel interface to physical kind of devices like this. This is the extension of it where you have much richer physical interaction in the real world. This is the enabler for it. And it shows itself in a few kind of really obvious places. So just take something as simple as a voice assistant. You will never most”
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 even with video games, how long can we create that immersive experience to where you expand the boundary? And one of the things we realized is that you're just way more forgiving when something has a personality and it's physical. That is the key that unlocks robotics interacting in the physical world more generally is that when you don't have a personality and you make a mistake as a robot, the stupid robot made a mistake. Why is it not perfect? When you have a character and you make a mistake, you have empathy and it becomes endearing and you're way more forgiving. And that was the key that was like, I think goes far, far beyond entertainment.”
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 just another character. And so you can almost like in early aspirations, we thought it would be really incredible if you had a diversity of characters where you almost help encourage which direction it goes just like in a role-playing game. And you had think of like the seven dwarves sort of. And initially we even thought that it would be amazing if like, you know, like their characters actually help them have strengths and weaknesses in some, you know, like whatever they end up doing. Some are scared, some are arrogant, some are super warm and like kind of friendly. And in the end, we focused on one because it made it very clear that, hey, we got to build out enough depth here because you're kind of trying to expand. It's almost like how long can you maintain a fiction that this character is alive to where the person's explorations don't hit a boundary, which happens almost immediately with typical toys.”
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 was truly universal. It was not like people stopped caring after 10, 12 years old. And so we started doing experiments and we found something as simple as increasing the amount of eye contact, like the amount of times in a minute that he'll look over for your approval to kind of make eye contact just by, I think, doubling it. We increased the playtime engagement by 40%. Like you see these sort of like kind of interactions where you build that empathy. And so we studied pets. We studied virtual characters. There's like a lot of times actually dogs are one of the perfect, most perfect influencers behind these sort of interactions. And what we realized is that And in the end, it was all about the character”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happy in the same way that the first time you walk in and your toddler sees you, they're so happy, but they're not going to be that happy for the entirety of your next two hours. But like you have this like spike and response. Or if you leave Malone for too long, he gets bored and starts causing trouble and like nudging things off the table. Or if you beat him in a game, the most enjoyable emotions are him getting frustrated and grumpy to a point where our testers and our customers would be like I had to let him win because I don't want him to be upset. And so you start to like create this feedback loop where you see how powerful those emotions are. And just to give an example, something as simple as eye contact. You don't think about it in a movie, just like it kind of happens like, you know, camera angles and so forth. But that's not really a prominent source of interaction. What happens when physical character like Cosma, when he makes eye contact with you, it built universal kind of connection. Kids all the way through adults.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Character AI, where if you imagine the dimensionality of emotions, happy, sad, angry, surprised, confused, scared, like you think of these extreme emotions. We almost like kind of put this challenge to kind of populate this library of responses on how do you show the extreme response that goes to the extreme spectrum on angry or frustrated or whatever. And so that gave us a lot of intuition and learnings. And then we started parameterizing them where it wasn't just a fixed recording, but they were parametrized and had randomness to them where you could have infinite permutations of happy and surprised and so forth. And then we had a behavioral engine that took the context from the real world and would interpret it and then create kind of probability mappings on what sort of responses you would have that actually made sense. And so if Cosmos saw you for the first time in a day, he'd be really surprised and”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too restrictive. The physical world is just too restrictive, and you don't have a graphics engine. It's like all this. But on the character side, and clearly we moved in that direction as like kind of the winning path. We partnered up with this really, we immediately went towards Pixar. And Carlos Baina, he was one of like had been at Pixar for nine years. He'd worked on tons of the movies, including Wally and others, and just immediately kind of spoke the language and it just clicked on how you think about that like kind of magic and drive. And then we built out a team with him as like a really kind of prominent kind of driver of this with different types of backgrounds and animators and character developers where we put these constraints on the team, but then got them to really try to create magic despite that. And we converged on this system that was at the overlap of character and the character.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pushed a huge amount of expectations onto the software team where, yes, we're going to use cheap, noisy motors and sensors, but we're going to fix it on the software side. Then we found on the design and character side, there was a faction that was more from like a game design background that thought that it should be very games-driven Cosmo, where you create a whole bunch of games experiences and it's all about like game mechanics. And then there was a fashion which my co-founder either most involved in this like really believed in, which was character driven. And the argument is that you will never compete with what you can do virtually from a game standpoint, but you actually, on the character side, put this into your wheelhouse and put it more towards your advantage.”
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 came from this combination of a team that we had, it was quite cool because, and by the way, you ask anybody that's experienced in the toy entertainment space, you'll never sell a product over $99. That was fundamentally false, and we believed it to be false. It was because the experience had to kind of, you know, meet the mark. And so we pushed past that amount, but there was a pressure where the higher you go, the more seasonal you become and the tougher it becomes. And so on the cost side, we very quickly partnered up with some previous contacts that we worked with where just as an example, our head of mechanical engineering was one of the earliest heads of engineering at Logitech and has a billion units of consumer products in circulation that he's worked on. So like crazy, low cost, high volume consumer product experience. We had a really great mechanical engineering team. And just a very practical mindset where we were not going to compromise on feasibility in the market in order to chase something that would be an enabler.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most companies have done anything in human robot interaction really missed the mark or underinvest in the character side of it. They overinvest in the mechanical side of it and then varied results on the AI side of it. And so the thinking is that you put more mechanical flexibility into it. You're going to do better. You don't necessarily, you actually create a much higher bar for a high ROI because now your price point goes up, your expectations go up. And if the AI can't meet it or the overall experience isn't there, you missed the mark.”
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'm doing my best in this world. Exactly. So it's interesting because all of Cosmos is only four degrees of freedom. And two of them are the two treads, which is for basic movement. And so you literally have only a head that goes up and down, a lift that goes up and down, and then your two wheels. And you have sound and a screen and a low resolution screen. And with that, it's actually pretty incredible.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meet the expectations of $1,000 product. And so in order to make this work, your cost of goods had to be well under $100. In a case of Cosmo, we got it under $50 end-to-end fully packaged and delivered.”
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, that's right. And in fact, we realized pretty quickly that perfection is actually not fun. Because in a traditional roboticist sense, the first kind of path planner and this is the part that I worked on out of the gate was like a lot of the kind of AI systems where you have these vehicles and cars racing kind of making optimal maneuvers to try to kind of get ahead. And you realize very quickly that's actually not fun because you want the chaos from mistakes. And so you start to kind of intentionally almost add noise to the system in order to kind of create more of a realism in the exact same way the human player might start really ineffective and inefficient and then start to kind of increase their quality bar as they progress. And there is a really, really aggressive constraint that's forced on you by being a consumer product where the price point matters a ton, particularly in kind of an entertainment where you can't make a thousand dollar product unless you're 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
“Mention for the physical world. And then with Cosmo, we expanded that video game engine to create a character and Kind of an animation and interaction engine on top of it that allowed us to start to create these much more rich experiences. And a lot of those elements were almost like a proving ground for what would human robot interaction feel like in a domain that's much more forgiving, where you can make mistakes in a game. It's okay if cargo goes off the track or if Cosmo makes a mistake. And what's funny is actually we're so worried about that. In reality, we realized very quickly that those mistakes can be endearing. And if you make a mistake, as long as you realize you make a mistake and have the right emotional reaction to it, it builds even more empathy with the character. That's brilliant.”
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 exactly right. We literally use that exact same phrase because in the case of Drive, this was a parallel of the racing genre. And the goal was to effectively have a physical racing experience, but have a virtual state at all times that matches what's happening in the physical world. And then you can have a video game off of that. And you can have different characters, different traits for the cars, weapons and interactions and special abilities and all these sort of things that you think of virtually, but then you can have it physically. And one of the things that we were really surprised by that really stood out and immediately led us to really kind of accelerate the path towards Cosmo is that things that feel like they're really constrained and simple in the physical world, they have an amplified impact on people where the exact same experience virtually would not have anywhere near the impact, but seeing it physically really stood out. And so effectively with Drive, we were creating a video game.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it was virtual, and two, it was like a story on Rails that had no interactivity to it. It was very fixed and it obviously had a magic to it. But where you really start to hit a different level of experiences when you're actually able to physically interact with that robot?”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interface device and the brain with much more computation behind a physical world experience that wouldn't have been possible previously. And so we really got excited about that and how we push all the complexity from the physical world into software by using really inexpensive components, but putting huge amounts of complexity into the AI side. And so Cosmo became our second product. And the one that we're probably most proud of. The idea there was to create a physical character that had enough understanding and awareness of the physical world around it in the context that mattered to feel like he was alive and to be able to have these emotional kind connections and experiences with people that you would typically only find inside of a movie. And the motivation very much was Pixar. We had an incredible respect and appreciation for what they were able to build in this really beautiful fashion and film. But it was always like a”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To commercialize this into a company, but actually do a bottoms up approach where we could have a huge impact in a space that was ripe to have an impact at that time. Had relatively little innovation in a toy space, an entertainment space. You had these really rich experiences in video games and movies. But there was like this chasm in between. And so we thought that we could really reinvent that experience. And there was a really fascinating transition technically that was happening at the time where the cost of components was plummeting because of the mobile phone industry and then the smartphone industry. And so the cost of a microcontroller, of a camera, of a motor, of memory, of microphones cameras was dropping by orders of magnitude. And then on top of that with iPhone coming out in 2007, I believe it started to become apparent within a couple of years that this could become a really incredible”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Functionality and build value that wouldn't have been possible without these approaches. And that's what drove us. And we had kind of some experiences through previous jobs and internships where we got to see the applied side of robotics. And at that time, there was actually relatively few applications of robotics that were outside of peer research or industrial applications, military applications and so forth. There were very few outside of it. So maybe iRobot was like one exception and maybe there were a few others. But for the most part, there weren't that many. And so we got excited about consumer applications of robotics where you could leverage way higher levels of intelligence through software to create value and experiences that were just not possible in those fields today. And we saw kind of a pretty wide range of applications that varied in the complexity of what it would take to actually solve those. And what we wanted to do 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
“We started Anki back in while we were still in graduate school. So myself and my two co founders, we were PhD students in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. And so we were studying robotics, AI, machine learning, kind of different areas. One of my co-founders was working on walking robots for a period of time. And so we all had a bit of a really kind of a deeper passion for applications of robotics and AI where there's like a spectrum where there's people that get like really fascinated by the theory of AI and machine learning and robotics where whether it gets applied in the near future or not is less of a kind of factor on them, but they love the pursuit of the challenge. And that's necessary. And there's a lot of incredible breakthroughs that happen there. We're probably closer to the other end of the spectrum where we love the technology and all the evolution of it, but we were really driven by applications. Like how can you really reinvent experiences?”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Space in a way that you just wouldn't because you get lost in the surface area if you have something that is just infinitely articulable.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forcing these projects where all you have is like a ball that can like kind of jump and manipulate itself or like really, really like aggressive constraints where you're forced to kind of extract the deepest level of motion. And so in a lot of ways, when we thought about Cosmo, you're right. If we had to like describe it in one small phrase, it was bringing a pixel character to life in the real world. It's what we were going for. And in a lot of ways, what was interesting is that with Wally, which we studied incredibly deeply, and in fact, some of our team were kind of had worked previously at Pixar and on their project, they intentionally constrained Wally as well, even though in an animated film, you could do whatever you wanted to, because it forced you to really saturate the smaller amount of dimensions. But you sometimes end up getting a far more beautiful output because you're pushing at the extremes of this emotion.”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like dimensionality, voice, all these sort of things actually become a crutch where you get lost in a search space almost. And so some of the best animators that we've worked with, they almost like study when they come up in building their expertise by”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To replicate that even in its reasonably close form takes a giant amount of joints and actuators and motion and sensors and encoders and so forth. But then you're almost like setting an expectation that the closer you try to get to human form, the more you expect the strengths to match. And that's not the way AI works is there's places where you're way stronger and there's places where you're weaker. And by moving away from human form, you can actually change the rules and embrace your strengths and bypass your weaknesses.”
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 true. And it's interesting because it was very intentional to go really far away from human form when you think about a character like Cosmo or Wali where you can completely rethink the constraints you put on that character, what tools you leverage, and then how you actually create a personality and level of intelligence interactivity that actually matches the constraints that you're under, whether it's mechanical or sensors or AI of the day. This is why I almost was always very surprised by how much energy people put towards trying to replicate human form in a robot because you actually take on some pretty significant kind of constraints and downsides when you do that, the first of which is obviously the cost where it's just the articulation of a human body is just so like magical in both the precision as well as the dimensionality that”
2021-11-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #241 – Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wally and R2D2, where they were able to convey such an incredible degree of Intent, emotion, and kind of character attachment without having any language whatsoever. And just purely through the richness of emotional interaction. So those are fantastic. And then the Terminator series just like really wide range, 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