YouSaid · the spoken record

Qasar Younis

lines on the record: 92
first: 2026-07-21
most recent: 2026-07-21
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

“Kind of almost myopic, the companies are just always looking at the market that's just like within the 30, you know, between San Jose and San Francisco. It's like, actually, the market is really big. I think physical AI, the nature of it being physical, I think we have to be a very international company. And I think we've had a lot of success being international.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've, I think, navigated it quite well. I've lived in Japan, I lived in Germany, I lived in Dubai, also being Pakistani by birth. I think that's also influenced our company. Peter's only lived in Michigan and here, but he is a German. But so I think innately we're more, we think about the globe more. I think when I was both at Google and at OYC, I was always surprised at how.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think America particularly still the most advanced in terms of when you take account the business model. The second thing for a company like Applied Intuition, we're an extremely global company. We work with everybody minus, we don't have an office in China, but really everyone else on the globe. And we're a horizontal company. We're a technology provider. And I think more Silicon Valley companies, I think, can employ a little bit of what we do, which is work very, I would say, collaboratively with the local economies as sovereign AI becomes more of a real thing. We have to build businesses that take that into account. By the way, we're not the first ones to do this. If you look at the history of America, you read the history of Standard Oil, you'll see that this is, that was the history of companies. You'd work internationally. Aramco is not a random company, right? You build based on the geopolitical realities of the time. And so I think, you know.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's 70 years of history there. Like that's not even a debate anymore. I mean, I think it could be a debate if we're sitting here in 1965 and having a debate, maybe centrally controlled systems work better. There's no debate anymore, folks. Systems where individuals make decisions on their own interest actually work better for society. And so that doesn't mean everything is perfect and you can't extrapolate. That same thing with AI. It doesn't mean everything is going to be perfect. But net, net, it's definitely going to be better. And that's roughly what my commencement speech was without the booze. Mark and these guys were booing. So they did it out. Eric was booing, he was throwing stuff, and I just edited it out”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's just how it is. So I think I'm, and I think we as technologists, I think sometimes it's, I think, an inclination just to say leave these people behind. I think you have to bring them along. You have to explain it to them. But we also have to treat folks like adults and say, if you don't get it after I explain it a couple times, then you just don't get it. There's like a middle ground. It's not everyone's an idiot and we should just be technology will just be perfect, perfect, perfect. There's a middle ground. Let's have that conversation to a point. And then we just move forward and we make society better, and then the results show it. I mean, there's people who still shockingly believe communism is the right answer. I mean, I just want to say why, and I am a capitalist. I can't not admit that.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have a role to play. That's basically what my message is. And that's the case. I think if you feel like if I think the obvious abundance that comes from self-driving trucks, self-driving cars and the fact that people don't die, which is amazing, but then you also get this efficiency of cheaper energy, et cetera. If all those things don't still satisfy your fear, you as a person, it's up to your responsibility to really learn about that technology. You can't just say, well, I'm afraid of it and my reaction is shut it down. That's not that simple. And I don't say this just to say that we're competing with the Chinese, but there's a confucian saying by Confucius there's no hand can block the sun. And the sun is technological progress. And if we as a society don't embrace technological progress, Will be left behind.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to say which tech leaders who just basically avoid it by punting and saying I'm not going to talk about it. I talk about this stuff. And partly it's the General Motors Institute. No one's like these are I don't want to throw judgment on the people we recruit out of MIT and Stanford, but I say GMI people are a little different and they're like they're like pragmatic people. You don't go to a place like GMI if you believe a superficial view of what corporations do. Corporations are just people working on projects together. And by the way, people working on projects together in government people working projects together in nonprofits, they all screw up. And so it's too simple to say AI corporations are terrible. This also, you can't say the other side, which is like, it'll all be great.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that. But I think massive energy farm that's completely autonomous, that's going to be the future. And I think everyone, like everyone reacts to things like that with fear. And it's like, guys, that's amazing. That means energy costs go way.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I like that scene. I think it's iRobot when Will Smith jumps in the car, and whatever his accomplices in the car, and he puts the car in manual. She's like, what are you going to drive this thing yourself? Like out of like, you know, she's like crazy. Are you crazy? What are you going to drive this thing yourself? Like, that's what we're trying to find intuitions goal.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you decouple models from just the hardware, the hardware can do it now. That used to be a constraint. So the hardware is very fast and accurate now, which was actually. There's still overheating issues.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But back on laundry folding for a moment It's actually not far from being folded if you remove the time constraint. And so the trick that's played, and if you look at the latest research videos, is like,”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I do think housekeeping is a killer use case for physically eye. Peter thinks, too, that he always talks about in the company when does housekeeping and entertainment. He had Peter's long on humanoid entertainment.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It used to be on the timeline topic. We gave us timelines on self driving cars. What timelines do you want to give us, if any, on sort of Other interesting things that are worth tracking, like perhaps when we'll get laundry folded Things that emerged because of humanoids.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have so many milliseconds before we have to do something. And those performance constraints, they actually constrain the problem in a lot of ways. So we can have very large models. And we do have very large models that are used in the offward environment. But once you go onboard, all of those constraints are very real. And now we need to train a much smaller model that has these safety constraints, these determinism constraints. And that's the hard part about physical. That's also the moat, right? It is what makes our tooling and our competencies valuable because it's just really hard to meet all of these constraints in a physical system.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like us sitting in 2007 saying, we should have an app store. What type of apps? And we would come up with a list of eight. And then like, there'll be a messaging one. And then there'll be a camera one. And it's like, now you look at the app store and it's like, you know, there's an app for like the hotel you go to. And it's like, you know, to order, you know, food off the menu. Yeah.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. It's like if development costs are zero, then people will do that. I mean, you guys remember the early iPhone apps, the hits were like the beer one or the fart app. If you imagine that in like, yeah, if you imagine that in 98 with the symbion mobile, you know, whatever the OS from ITU, who's Erickson or somebody, that would be impossible. You need a team of like 50 people to develop a beer thing for the Blackberry. So I think there's a similar type of thing that's happening. We really want to be a”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think sometimes people ask us being a tooling company, and like you take self-driving trucks, we deploy self-driving trucks, and many of the self-driving trucking companies use their tools. I think sometimes people ask, oh, look, with Dana, are you going to enable these competitors? That's great. That's absolutely completely fine. If you look at Google and what Google did to web applications, there was a massive internet. Google still succeeded through search and YouTube and other web apps and other folks learned and used open source products and then ultimately closed source products and ultimately venture-backed products. And we think the same thing could happen here.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some core ingredients that we're bringing together in data, right? We're making it way easier to actually get imitation learning to work, way easier to make reinforcement learning work in combination with that. Where we have pre-trained models that can be used as a baseline for a lot of things. World models, advanced simulation tech, all of these things come together. And then you're sort of limited by your creativity. Like, well, what do I want to do? And if you think about any kind of physical AI task as a, you are understanding the world and you're manipulating something and we can build that. That can be built now much more easily in this tool.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think midterm, we want Dana, if not the short term, to really make humanoids way more real. There's, I mean, how many? It's like a thousand core tasks in a home from humanoids. And these companies, it's like such, I mean, you talk to people who work in these companies. Everything is difficult. Every step of the way is difficult collecting data is difficult. Cleaning that data is difficult. Training those models or deploying the model is difficult. And the bar being, I want a high school kid to make a humanoid. So that's our path. And we think there could be a lot there. But that's like the obvious stuff. I think the true non-obvious stuff is going to be, we'll look back, we'll be way more interesting.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you think about folks with disabilities. We always think about humanoids as this very important task of folding laundry, which seems to me. So we focus on the important aspect, but when you allow these tools to exist, I mean, we started a tooling company. I mean, I feel so importantly that tools are like what separates actually advanced civilizations from, you know, less advanced civilizations. And our first mark for the company was monkey's head. And then we got a designer who said, what is stupid? I was like, I thought it was pretty good.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no reason autonomy should be this obscure, difficult, you know, alchemistic technology. And I think not only does that have a huge impact on society, it also allows people to understand that these systems are not like magic. If I can develop a Roomba for myself in my house on a weekend using Dana. Then it's not suddenly so scary. And I think that's important.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just lowering the bar of what it means to develop an autonomous system. Autonomy is still actually quite in the scope of software is quite exotic. Because of the things that we've talked about and we've just brought that down very, very aggressively. It's kind of like the old adage of how do you make a great product in software? It's like you either increase safety, convenience, or cost, and we want to try to do all three of those things with Dana. Kids can develop robots for their own use, and that extends to humanoids. So we're not just talking about land-based systems or ones that are, so humanoids, you can do drones. The fact that right now writing drone software and deploying it at the time is quite obscure and almost hobbyist. We want to just make that absolutely like to, you know, maybe not child's play, but like teenager play.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Readina is our agentic platform for physical AI and everything that we've built and developed over the past nearly a decade, every tool, every technique. Fats available in Dana, and it's very actually easy to use with the agentic interface. And so workflows that used to maybe take days or weeks to run You can now run those in minutes in many cases. And this just lowers the barrier to entry to building these systems.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called Dana, which is the street that applied intuition is headquartered on. And this comes from our tooling background. And if you look at like how tooling has changed in the digital AI world, if you look at what Claude did to all, we also remember from mixed panel to GitLab, GitHub, all these, now everything has moved into a very different, almost IDE, frankly speaking. We think the same thing's going to happen in the physical world. And so that's what we're building. That's what we built and that's what we're launching. And we already use it in-house to develop our autonomy system, which is, you know, and we're working on the most kind of scaled complex systems on the planet in all these different verticals. So we're pretty confident that it's actually quite useful. And we've seen massive productivity gains. But also, you know, we think like other companies will use this to build their own systems.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. I mean, the product that we're announcing, I think has probably come out around with this time is called Dana. So you can just simplify everything that applied intuition does into two buckets, which is the, we've been talking mostly about the models that go on the machines. Then this is, as we say, onboard software or onboard AI. Then there's offboard AI. This is the tools to design and develop these same systems. They're the models that actually go on the machines. Our vision for that is the delivery robot is a great example is like a high school kid or a middle schooler, they can make iPhone apps. They should be able to make autonomous systems. So why can't they? Just ask that's a very simple question. Why can't a”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the thing is, there's a software technology thing which is one part of the problem. But the other part is it's the redundancies that you need in hardware and the validation necessary for those redundancies. And in many cases, that can actually be a long pull. It's like, oh, they're productionizing a fully redundant steering system, fully redundant braking system. That's not a high value production yet. And once you get that high-value production, you get the quality up, and then that's validated, and now you can actually do these.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even truckers don't want their kids to become truckers. It's for that reason. They want their kids to be, at the very least, safer line of work. But do the notwithstanding all that, how long will there be, do you think there'll be safety drivers in long haul trucks that are self-driving? Or let's say other, even just somebody in the cab to deal with what happens when they ride.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like there's other jobs I can take. And so I understand you're trying to enumerate for the audience like, but these are not good jobs. And the best evidence is this is not a mining podcast. This is not a podcast about, hey, long-haul trucking is so great. They're just not attractive jobs.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Left arm. Exactly. Yeah. There's photos of a truck driver who's been driving for 30 years, one half their face to the other half's face because it's exposed to the sun. A more interesting or even more stark stat, mining is 1% of the labor pool globally, 8% of work-related fatalities. Do you think people are rushing to work in mines when they hear stats like this? Most major mines have a fatality regularly, which means once, twice a year, three times a year. And if you ever visit a mine, you'll see that everything is based around safety because once you experience one of your coworkers dying, then you're like What am I doing here?”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And so, like obesity and then heart disease, hypertension, so forth are all very high one. And then two is, I think, the vibration is very difficult. Stress in the body. And then the third is, you mentioned cancer, but I think it's drug terms have like a much higher rate of melanoma on their left arm. Exactly. Yeah. There's photos.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the thing, so tell me if I have this right, but I believe it's because I think Long Hall turned drivers die of life expectancy 10 years less than their peers. And I think it's a con people say it's a consequence of several things. So one is some combination of nutrition and sleep. It's basically, you know,”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally buy a plane to go to a mine and work, or you go offshore oil rigs. Those jobs exist. If you want a job that pays six figures, they exist. Even with such lucrative pay packages, it's not enough because people are like, you know what? I like kind of being around my family. And I'm willing to take an incremental decrease in cost and how much money I make. And then also, like, I think today more than ever, things like back pain and like being exposed to the sun and cancer and people care about that's now a part of these things.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me use a parallel analogy, which is very clear, and then you can. You know, people will say, like, nobody wants to work anymore. And they say, well, McDonald's has all these job openings. No, no, actually, what it is, is those people that used to work at McDonald's now, DoorDash and Uber. Because it's better for them because they can open, they can start their hours and end their hours, and they don't have to. There's no boss and they don't have to like stand on their feet and they can surf their phone in between, you know, orders, and they don't's the reason. It's not random. The market is efficient. And so in the truck driving example, why does somebody not want to be away from their family for four to eight days in a row doing long-haul trucking? The more a sharp example is in Australia, why don't people want to...”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rockstone cement. When are those? I can tell you the people who own those things and run those things want it today So it's literally, then you don't have a literally, we can't make this stuff fast enough. The macro point, though, that people don't talk about, I think all the stuff's going to happen. It happened pretty soon. It happened fairly soon. But the macro point in legislation and the economics, the political economy of this conversation is AI is really, you have this big pushback in digital AI because accountants are like, I don't know what's going to happen to my job and VCs, I'm sure all of your associates are very scared. But in our universe,”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You as the provider of self driving trucks, if you're doing the whole thing, like some of the companies are, which we're not, you have to show every mile, I'm going to save you this many dollars. And it's like, for sure, for sure, for sure. Because the buyer is unsophisticated. And they're just like, well, I already got a staff that can drive. And it's like, and they're just not inclined. Now, where we're playing in Japan, it's not random that we're doing truck in Japan. There's a massive labor shortage today, and there's an imploding demographic, you know, a situation. And so there's a demand from almost every sector, and that's why we've picked that market to really grow. But I think you can take even more obscure, like when will all queries, you know, literally where you're moving cement, you're moving dirt, not queries Q-A-A-R-S-Q-U-A-R-R-Y, queries, quarries.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's what we, so that's the passenger side. The long haul trucking, completely different economics, complete business model. There are many companies right now. I would say probably north of five that are running long haul trucks with drivers carrying loads between America and China. If you had China's probably getting into double digits, so it's there. But the reason you don't know it and the reason it's not top of mind is it's not a consumer product. Unlike on the Waymo and Tesla side where investors are willing to essentially give you some market cap adjustment for the potential of the trucking business is like you buy a car with your heartstrings, you buy a truck with a calculator. Yeah. It's a calculator business. And so it's like pure dollars and cents. And so I think”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, you live in LA. And so five years ago, I'd go to LA, people would be like, what's applied intuition? I don't know what self-driving cars are. In the last couple years, now they all know self-driving, and some of them even know applied intuition because they know from the other manufacturers. I think you fast forward another two to four years. Everybody knows it now. Does that mean everyone's taking Weibos exclusively? The answer is no, actually. Now, there is a huge, huge, if you look at the numbers, if you're Uber, you got to be scared. I mean, they're just eating into ride sharing. Yeah, but to get 100% ubiquity, I mean, that's another, it has to be extremely cheap.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's 26 now. I mean, certainly by 30. All right. Yeah, certainly by 30. And I would say the big variable there really is because Wayma will say is that the dollars and cents per city already work. And it's like, well, a company that has basically unlimited capital, why are they not already in 200 cities? But then you see their launch schedule is pretty aggressive. And you're like, that can get there. Maybe he was being aggressive. I would say 28 I would say available in 30, but routine and maybe like 32.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's because they want to price envelope, which allows them to keep their thin razor to thin margins. And at a scale, which is deployed across 100 plus countries in V1. And so if you're just doing a small deployment, it's very different. And I think, and the last thing I would say is the buyer of a Subaru or a buyer of a Suzuki have very different brand expectations than a buyer of a Tesla. And so including the age of the consumer and what they think will happen and what won't happen. So that's also the reason. So if you're Suzuki, you're like, my buyer's don't want this stuff. So I'm not going to jam it into the car. It's not because they're not technically competent. This is a different area.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Specifically Waymo has a different technology. Overbuilt, and then try to trim and make it really, really cheap. And that's the big debate who's going to get there first. Tesla with full self-driving or Weymouth with cost and geographic ubiquity. But you know what we're not debating about? Is it going to happen? You know what we're not debating about? Is there a big technical breakthrough that needs to happen? None of those things. So now we're clearly in the engineering side of self-driving, which is just this grind down to dollar per mile efficiency. And the moment that it's cheap, guess what? All the OEMs are smart. They'll just, they just adopt it. It's not the OEMs are resistant because they don't think consumers want it or they don't understand the technology.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are the killer applications. So I think there's a very, very similar kind of wait, wait, wait, and then it's just basically ubiquitous in every vehicle. If you had to ask me for what that number is, 28 SOP, start of production, 29, 30. And then by the early 30s, it'll start becoming very cheap to free.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every single OEM without exception, even the lowest dollar OEMs are working on an FSD competitor. So it'll come. But it'll just like, you know, with a good analogy to think about self-driving in the personally owned ecosystem is mobile phones. We had the satellite phones, then we had the Qualcomm brick phones, then we had the motor roll razors. And from the late 90s to the late double zeros, their view was like, when's mobile going to come? There was a huge like, and then it comes by 07 from the iPhone launch, it's like four years when you get Uber, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a driver behind the steering wheel still there, but generally like Tesla drives everywhere, they're like sub $1,000. There's an aggressive that's that's chip sensors, the package, the software, everything. We anticipate that there's a very aggressive once you get to like 500, the automotive OEMs will actually subsidize it for free. They'll just give it to you. This happened in nav systems. If you guys remember, NAV systems used to be a big thing. You pay four grand, $3,500 to get a nav system. And then suddenly it became frigate and it just became default. I think that'll happen. There's a weird thing, which is like actually getting into a subset of your cars costs X dollars. And to get into all the cars costs X plus just a small incremental amount. These are just a fixed cost and the way that how many vehicles and the way the assembly line comes and the way you have homologation, all these testing regimes, all this stuff. So I think you'll have wait, wait, wait, and then a lot.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, silver. So let's split the. There's multiple points that were brought up here. One is on the, let's say. Personally, own vehicles, and why are they not more ubiquitous? Part of that is the manufacturers are not good at deploying technology. Part of that is they want to be safety conscious, but most of it is cost, cost, cost. What you're seeing in China, which is China's kind of a different EV ecosystem mainly because they don't care about profits. And you're talking about business that doesn't care about profits. It changes the entire calculus of the entire industry, doesn't care. But what you're seeing is you're seeing L2+ systems. So we can simplify the entire self-driving conversation to is there a driver behind the steering wheel?”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right off the cliff. So, and then, you know, Tesla's rolling out their Robotexi, you know, is starting to show up in the wild. So on the one hand, those exist. On the other hand, 99.99999999999999999999999999% of cars are still not self-driving. And then I would say maybe just one other would be the self-driving trucks. There's been this recurring kind of panic in the press of like trucks become self-driving and the employment, you know, all these truck drivers me out of a job. And sitting here today, I don't think, I don't know, is there. Are there any trucks on the road that are self driving that don't have at least a safety driver in the truck? And I think the answer is probably still.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is like really impressive. Yeah, for people who haven't driven the big Highway 1 Big Sur, like, that's a stress-filled drive. He said it was great. Anyway, so I wouldn't have been talking to him had it not been pretty easy.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of like the AGI thing. It's like Right. The host keeps moving. The But yeah, well, self-driving X whatever remote monitoring is happening. The Tesla, we have a home in Los Angeles, and you guys may recall there was a large fire in Los Angeles, and then the power, then the California power grid was buckling even before that. So it actually turns out among the things cybertucks are good at is they're very good batteries for powering your house. And so literally we have cybertrucks as our backup battery for the house. And as of last year, whatever, the FSD release, I forget the exact one, but there was one where it at least a lot of people thought it really turned the corner.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think you can call. I think Tesla is kind of like the AGI thing. It's like, you know, if we're talking 20 years ago, everything we're seeing right now is like a mind-blowingly AGI. The host keeps moving. The Tesla stuff's amazing. You can look at a bunch of manufacturers, Blue Crews, Super Crews, BMW, Volvo's pilot. They're all quite impressive systems. They're not full self-driving. But yeah.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AAAs. So almost basically around 20 less than 20 years maybe. And there have been lots of predictions over the last 20 years of self-driving cars were imminent at any moment. So I guess the bad news is we're sitting here today and most cars are not self-driving. The good news is there are now self-driving cars. And so the way most cars are driving all over, you know, in the places they're deployed, it's become, you know, like people in San Francisco are, I think, treat it now as routine that they get into. And I think you can call.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So self driving cars, so we've all been talking about self driving cars for like, I think the whole thing started around 2005 or something with the DARPA Grand Challenge originally. And so, and then Google engaged on the program shortly after that. Yeah, late double.”
2026-07-21 · a16z Podcast · Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source