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Sertac Karaman

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97

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2020-05-20

most recent

2020-05-20

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1

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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

1. “Is quite incredible, which is quite incredible. So, you know, I would say that it's kind of like quite baffling, actually, you know, in a lot of fields that we think about how little we know. And so I think here too, we know that in the worst case, things are pretty hard, but in practice, generally things work. So it's just kind of baffling decision making, how little we know, just like how little we know about the beginning of time, how little we know about our own future. Like if you actually go into like from Belman's equation all the way down, I mean, there's also how little we know about mathematics. I mean, we don't even know if the axioms are consistent. It's just crazy.”

   2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “It talks about how computationally hard certain problems can be by nowadays what people call curse of dimensionality. And so as the number of variables kind of grow, the number of decisions you can make grows rapidly. Like if you have 100 variables, each one of them take 10 values, all possible assignments is more than the number of atoms in the universe. It's just crazy. And that kind of thinking is just embodied in that one equation that I really like.”

   2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Determine how do you determine that? And there is one beautiful equation that, you know, like today people do reinforcement, we still use it. And it's baffling to me because it both kind of tells you the simplicity because it's a single equation that anyone can write down. You can teach it in the first course on decision making. At the same time, it tells you how computationally, how hard the problem is. I feel like a lot of the things that I've done at MIT for research has been kind of just this fight against computational efficiency, things like how can we get it faster to the point where we now got to like, let's just redesign this chip. Like maybe that's the way. But I think”

   2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “An interesting question. I have done a lot of work myself in decision making, so I've been interested in that area. So, you know, in robotics, you have somehow the field has split into like, you know, there's people who would work on like perception, how robots perceive the environment. Then how do you actually make decisions? And there's people also like how do people interact with robots, there's a whole bunch of different fields. And, you know, I have admittedly worked a lot on the more control and decision making than the others. And I think that, you know, the one equation that has always kind of baffled me is Bellman's equation. And so it's this person who have realized like way back, you know, more than half a century ago on how do you actually sit down? And if you have several variables that you're kind of jointly trying to...”

   2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Just going back to the beginning and doing the same thing exactly I think that kind of thing happens. And I realize sort of as humans, there's the classical things that everybody has realized. If you put in some sort of like strategic thinking that's a little bit harder for machines, I think, sort of comprehend. Precision is easy to do. So that's what they excel in. And also sort of repeatability is easier to do. That's what they excel in. You can build machines that excel in strategy as well and beat humans that way too, but that's a lot harder to build.”

   2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Machines win. We look at that quite a bit. I mean, I think that you will see quickly that you can design a course. And in certain courses, like in the middle somewhere, if you kind of run through the course once, you know, the machine gets beaten pretty much consistently by slightly. But if you go through the course like 10 times, humans get beaten very slightly but consistently. So humans at some point, you know, you get confused, you get tired and things like that versus this machine is just executing the same line of code. Tirelessly”

   2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Like, we want to be careful here, but because we don't want people to crash a lot, but certainly we want them to push it so that, you know, everybody crashes once or twice. And they're really pushing it to their limits.”

   2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Could be the exciting part, and I think as an engineer, it's a very different situation to be in. Like in academia, a lot of my colleagues who are actually in this race and they're really great researchers, but I've seen them trying to do similar things whereby they built this one drone and somebody with like a face mask and a glows are going right behind the drone. Trying to hold it if it falls down, imagine you don't have to do that. I think that's one of the nice things about Affapilot Challenge, where we have these drones and we're going to design the courses in a way that will keep pushing people up until the crashes start to happen. And we'll hopefully sort of, I don't think you want to tell people crashing is okay.”

   2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “And so I think at some point testing becomes very important. One of the nice things about Alphopilot is that they built the drone and they build a lot of drones. And it's okay to crash. In fact, I think maybe the viewers may kind of like to see things that surround it.”

   2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Question. Let's get to that. I want to answer your other question, which is the DARPA challenge days, right? What was really hard? I think we understand what we wanted to build, but still building things, that experimentation that iterated learning, that takes up a lot of time, actually. And so in my group, for example, in order for us to be able to develop fast, we build like VR environments. We'll take an aircraft. We'll put it in a motion capture room. big, huge motion capture room, and we'll fly it in real time. We'll render other images and beam it back to the drone. That sounds kind of notionally simple, but it's actually hard because now you're trying to fit all that data through the air into the drone. And so you need to do a few crazy things to make that happen. But once you do that, then at least you can try things. If you crash into something, you didn't actually crash. So it's like...”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Well, not soon. I think that depends on how you set up the race course. And so if the race course is a solemn course, I think people will kind of do it. But can you set up some course, like literally some core, you get to design it as the algorithm developer. Can you set up Samcores so that you can beat the best human? When is that going to happen? Like, that's not very easy. Even just setting up some course, if you let the human that you're competing with set up the course, it becomes a lot harder”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Being able to go way faster than any human can comprehend. Take an aircraft, forget the quadcopter, you take a fixed wing. While you're at it, you might as well put some rocket engines in the back and just light it. You go through the gate, and a human looks at it and just said, what just happened? And they would say it's impossible for me to do that. And that's closing the same technology gap that would one day steer cars out of accidents.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “And it's exciting. It's exciting for people. Students like it. It embodies all those problems. But going back, we're building code and code, another engine. And that engine, I hope, one day will be just like how impactful seatbelts were in driving. I hope so. Or it could enable next generation autonomous air taxis and things like that. I mean, it sounds crazy, but one day we may need to purchase land these things. If you really want to go from Boston to New York in one and a half hours, you may want to fix wing aircraft. Most of these companies that are kind of doing flying cars, they're focusing on that. But then how do you land it on top of a building? You may need to pull off like kind of fast maneuvers for a robot, like perch landage. Going to go and perch into a building. If you want to do that, like you need these kinds of systems. And so drone racing, you know, it be.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Like, we can't make transistors smaller because, like, quantum effects, electrons start to tunnel around. We can't clock it faster. One of the reasons why is because information doesn't travel faster in the universe. We're limited by that. Same thing with the laser scanner. But so then it becomes clear that, you know, the way you organize the chip into a CPU or even a GPU, you now need to look at how to redesign that if you're going to stick with silicon. Could go do other things too. I mean, there's that too, but you really almost need to take those transistors, put them in a different way so that the information travels on those transistors in a different way, in a much more way that is specific to the high speed cameras coming in. And so that's one of the things that we talk about quite a bit.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “An interesting problem. So, but like think about it you have CPUs, you clock them at several gigahertz. We don't clock them faster largely because we run into some heating issues and things like that. But another thing is that 3 gigahertz clock light travels kind of like on the order of a few inches or an inch. That's the size of a chip. And so you pass a clock cycle. And as the clock signal is going around in the chip, you pass another one. And so trying to coordinate that, the design of the complexity of the chip becomes so hard. I mean, we have hit the fundamental limits of the universe. So many things that we're designing. I don't know if people realize that it's great, but.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Yeah, you need to do a lot of parallel processing, as you can imagine. The same thing happens in the GPUs. The data is transferred in parallel somehow. It gets into some parallel processing. I think that, you know, now we're really kind of diverted off into so many different dimensions”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “And why are we at the limit of the camera frame rate? It's because camera captures data. It puts it into some serial connection. It could be USB or like there's something called camera serial interface that we use a lot. It puts into some serial connection and copper wires can only transmit so much data. And you hit the channel limit on copper wires. And you hit yet another kind of universal limit that you can transfer the data. So you have to be much more intelligent on how you capture those pixels. You can take compute and put it right next to the pixels. People are building those”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “I think it's both. I think it's both. In fact, they need to be co-developed, I think, in the future. I mean, that's a little bit what Nvidia does. Sort of like they almost like build the hardware and then they build the neural networks and then they build the hardware back and the neural networks back. And it goes back and forth. But it's that co-design. And I think that, you know, like we try to way back, we try to build a fast drone that could use a camera image to track what's moving in order to find where it is in the world. This typical sort of visual inertial state estimation problems that we would solve. And we just kind of realized that we're at the limit sometimes of doing simple tasks. We're at the limit of the camera frame rate. Because if you really want to track things, you want the camera image to be 90% kind of like or somewhat the same from one frame to the next.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “And use that kind of computing resources instead of rendering, you use it for the kind of artificial intelligence that goes in there, the autonomy. And you can either take control of the car and bring it to a full stop. But even if you can't do that, you can deliver what the human is trying to do. Human is trying to change the lane, but goes off the road not being able to do that with motor skills and the eyes. And, you know, you can get in there. And there's so many other things that you can enable with what I would call high throughput computing. You know, data is coming in extremely fast. And in real time, you have to process it. And the current CPUs, however fast you clock it, are typically not enough. You need to build those computers from the ground up so that they can ingest all that data. That I'm really interested in.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “States on traffic accidents. And many of them are like known cases, you know, like you're coming through like a ramp, going into a highway, you hit somebody and you're off, or you kind of get confused. You try to swerve into the next lane, you go off the road and you crash, whatever. And I think if you had enough computer in a car and a very fast camera right at the time of an accident, you could use all compute you have like you could shut down the infotainment system.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “The same issue. Humans play this game. And you have to react in milliseconds. And there's really, you know, you see something with your eyes. And then that information just flows through your brain into your hands so that you can command it. And there's some also delays on getting information back and forth. But suppose those delays that didn't exist. Just a delay between your eye and your fingers is a delay that a robot doesn't have to have. So we end up building in my research group like systems that see things at a kilohertz, like a human eye would barely hit 100 hertz. So imagine things that see stuff in slow motion, like 10x slow motion. It will be very useful. Like we talked a lot about autonomous cars. So we don't get to see it, but 100 lives are lost every day just in the United States.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Aggressive flight, fully autonomous aggressive flight. The problem that I'm interested in, you asked about Alphopilot, and I'll get there in a second, but the problem that I'm interested in, I'd love to build autonomous vehicles like drones that can go far faster than any human possibly can. I think we should recognize that we as humans have limitations in how fast we can process information. And those are some biological limitations. Like we think about this AI this way too. I mean, this has been discussed a lot, and this is not sort of my idea per se, but a lot of people kind of think about human-level AI. And they think that, you know, AI is not human level. One day it'll be human level and humans and AIs, they kind of interact versus I think that the situation really is that humans are at a certain place and AI keeps improving and at some point just crosses off. And, you know, it gets smarter and smarter and smarter. And so drawing.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Human being is controlling it, and so that's already there. And I've been interested in this problem for quite a while, actually, from a roboticist point of view. And that's what's happening in AlphaPilot.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Yeah, I mean, one interesting thing about it is that drone racing exists as an esport. And so it's much like you're playing a game, but there's a real drone going in an environment.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “I think they will enroll LiDARs, and especially either low range or short range or low resolution LIDARs are actually not that hard to build in solid state. They're still scanning, but like MEMS type of scanning LIDARs and things like that, they're like, they're actually not that hard. I think they will maybe kind of playing with the spectrum and the phase arrays. They're a little bit harder. But I think putting MM's mirror in there that kind of scans the environment. It's not hard. The only thing is that just like with a lot of the things that we do nowadays in developing technology, you hit fundamental limits of the universe. The speed of light becomes a problem. When you're trying to scan the environment, so you don't get either good resolution or you don't get range, but it's something that you can put in there affordably.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “We have a relatively minimal use of LiDARs, but we do use them. And I think in the future, I really believe that the following sequence of events may happen. Things first number one there may be a future in which there's cars with LiDARs and everything and the cameras, but in this 50 year ahead future they can just drive with cameras as well, especially in some isolated environments and cameras they go and they do the thing. In the same future, it's very possible that the light hours are so cheap and frankly make the software maybe a little less compute intensive at the very least or maybe less complicated so that they can be certified or ensured of their safety and things like that, that it's kind of stupid not to put the LIDAR. Imagine this. You either pay money for the LIDAR or you pay money for the compute. And if you don't put the LIDAR, it's a more expensive system because you have to put in a lot of compute. Like this is another possibility. I do think that a lot of the sort of initial deployments of self-driving vehicles.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Easier to build with. That's the other thing. I think to be very frank with you, I mean, we've seen a lot of sort of autonomous vehicles, companies come and go. And the approach has been, you know, you slap a lidar on a car and it's kind of easy to build with when you have a LiDAR, you know, you just kind of coat it up and you hit the button and you do a demo. So I think admittedly there's a lot of people, they focus on the LIDAR because it's easier to build with. That doesn't mean that, you know, without the camera, just cameras, you cannot do what they're doing, but it's just kind of a lot harder. And so you need to have certain kind of expertise to exploit that. What we believe in, and you've maybe seen some of it, is that we believe in computer vision. We certainly work on computer vision at Optimus, right? By a lot. And we've been doing that from day one. And we also believe in sensor fusion.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “First things first, I think I'm a big believer in just camera based autonomous vehicle systems. I think that you can put in a lot of autonomy and you can do great things. And it's very possible that at the time scales, like we said, we can't predict 20 years from now, like you may be able to do things that we're doing today only with LIDAR. And you may be able to do them just with cameras. And I think that you can just think that I would put my name on it too. Like, you know, there will be a time when you can only use cameras and you'll be fine. At that time, though, it's very possible that you find the LiDAR system as another robustifier, or it's so affordable that it's stupid not to, you know, just kind of put it there. I think we may be looking at a future like that.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “It's good to not just kind of show them when they come to our office for an interview, but just put it out there in terms of get people excited about what we're doing.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Yeah, that's well taken. I think I should say that it's not like we weren't able to. I think we made a decision at some point. That decision did involve me quite a bit on kind of sort of doing this in kind of coding code stealth mode for a bit. But I think that we'll open it up quite a lot more. And I think that we are also at Optimus Right kind of hitting a new era. We're big now. We're doing a lot of interesting things. And I think some of the deployments that we kind of announced were some of the first bits of information that we kind of put out into the world. We'll also put out our technology. A lot of the things that we've been developing is really amazing. And we're going to start putting that out. We're especially interested in sort of like being able to work with the best people. And I think, and I think.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “And I would imagine that it would be good to do some sort of like a one or two year plan when it's a little bit more predictable that the technology gaps you close and the kind of product that would ensue. So I know that from Optimus Ride or other companies that I get involved in, I mean at some point you find yourself in a situation where you're trying to build a product and people are investing in that building effort. And those investors do want to know as they compare the investments they want to make, they do want to know what happens in the next one or two years. And I think that's good to communicate that. But I think beyond that, it becomes a vision that we want to get to someday and saying five years, ten years, I don't think it means anything.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Of cycle continues, but um, you know, I admire it. I think they kind of go out there and they do great things. They do their own kind of experiment. I think we do our own. And I think we're closing some similar technology gaps, but some also, some are orthogonal as well. I think like we talked about, you know, people being remote, like it's something or in the kind of environments that we're in or think about a Tesla car, maybe you can enable it one day. Like there's low traffic, like you're kind of the stop-on-go motion, you just hit the button and you can really, or maybe there's another, you know, lane that you can pass into you going that. I think they can enable these kinds of pro, I believe it. And so I think that part, that is really important. And that is really key. And beyond that, I think, you know, when is it exactly going to happen and so on? I mean, it's like I said, it's very hard to predict.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Yeah, I think that going back, I think that iterated learning is key, that you're out there, you're running experiments to learn. And that doesn't mean sort of like Optimus, right? You're kind of doing something. But like in an environment, but what Tesla is doing, I think, is also kind of like this kind of notion. And people can go around and say, you know, this year, next year, the other year, and so on. But I think the nice thing about it is that they're out there. They're pushing this technology in. I think what they should do more of, I think that kind of informed people about what kind of technology that they're providing, you know, the good and the bad. And then, you know, not just sort of, you know, it works very well, but I think, and I'm not saying they're not doing bad and informing. I think they're kind of trying. They put up certain things, or at the very least, YouTube videos comes out on how the summon function works every now and then. And, you know, people get informed. And so that.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Do it so quickly, and that kind of didn't wasn't there so much, but at least like it was a kind of a technology that you could predict to some degree and so on. And now we're just kind of trying to build things that it's kind of hard to quantify what kind of a metric are we looking at.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Skillfully done. It's going to be very hard. There's one thing that I really believe in, and this is not my idea. And it's been discussed several times. But this kind of like something like a startup or a kind of an innovative company, including definitely Waymo Tesla, maybe even some of the other big companies that are kind of trying things. This kind of like iterated learning is very important. The fact that we're over there and we're trying things and so on, I think that's important. We try to understand. And I think that the coding code Silicon Valley has done that with business models pretty well. And now I think we're trying to get to do it where there's a literal technology gap. I mean, before like, you know, you're trying to build, I'm not trying to, you know, I think these companies are building great technology to, for example, enable internet search.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Sometimes, really, you're trying to build something where the technology does, like there's a technology gap. And Tesla had that with electric vehicles. When they first started, they would look at a chart much like a Moore's law type of chart, and they would just kind of extrapolate that out. And they'd say, we want to be here. What's the technology to get that? We don't know. It goes like this. So it's probably just going to keep going. With AI that goes into the cars, we don't even have that. What can you quantify What kind of chart are you looking at? So I think when there's that technology gap, it's just kind of really hard to predict. So now I realize I talk like five minutes and avoid your question. I didn't tell you anything about that.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Push that into like a few years ahead because it's just hard to explain. And there are things that are like looking at 20 years more maybe. Hopefully in my lifetime type of things. And because we don't know. I mean, we don't know how hard it is even. Like that's a problem. We don't know if some of these problems are actually AI complete. We have no idea what's going on. And, you know, we take all of that and then we clump it. And then we say three years from now. And then some of us are more optimistic. So they're shooting at the end of the year and some of us are more realistic. They say like five years. But we all, I think it's just hard to know. And I think trying to predict like products ahead two, three years, it's hard to know in the following sense. We typically say, okay, this is a technology company, but sometimes”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Even kind of trying to extrapolate the end state without knowing what exactly is going to go there, especially for like a machine learning approach. It's just kind of very hard to predict. But I do think the following does happen. I think a lot of people, you know what they do is that there's something that I called a couple times time dilation in technology prediction happens. Let me try to describe a little bit. There's a lot of things that are so far ahead. People think they're close. And there's a lot of things that are actually close. People think it's far ahead. People kind of look at a whole landscape of technology development. Admittedly, it's chaos. Anything can happen in any order at any time. And there's a whole bunch of things in there. People take it, clamp it, and put it into the next three years. And so then what happens is that there's some things that maybe can happen by the end of the year or next year and so on.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “First thing to lay out like everybody else, it's really hard to guess. I mean, I don't know where Tesla can look at or Elon Musk can look at and say, hey, it's the end of this year. I mean, I don't know what you can look at. Even the data that you look at the data.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “A fraction of a person is kind of operating the car because you have one operate several. If you're in that situation, you realize that the internal combustion engine type of cars are very inefficient. We build them to go on highways. They pass crash tests. They're like really heavy. They really don't need to be like 25 times the weight of its passengers or area-wise and so on. But if you get through those inefficiencies and if you really build like urban cars and things like that, I think the economics really starts to check out like to the point where, I mean, I don't know, you may be able to get into a car and it may be less than a dollar to go from A to B as long as you don't change your destination. You just pay 99 cents and go there. If you share it, if you take another stop somewhere, it becomes a lot better. These kinds of things, at least for models, at least for mathematics and theory, they start to really check out.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “It's not spent on gas, they think. It's not spent on the car per se as much. It's like their time. And if you didn't have a person driving or if you're in a scenario where point one person is driving the car.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “But I think you can, I think, really get to a point where the system at peak times really focuses on kind of It's a good fraction of the traffic to the point where you go, you look around, there's something there, and you just kind of basically get in there. And it's already waiting for you or something like that. And then you take it. If you do it at that scale, Today, for instance, Uber, if you talk to a driver, right? I mean, Uber takes a certain cut. It's a small cut or drivers would argue that it's a large cut, but when you look at the grand scheme of things, most of that money that you pay Uber kind of goes through the driver. And if you talk to the driver, the driver will claim that most of it is their time.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “And I think that you said what is needed, it's tens of thousands of vehicles. You really need to be like a specific fraction of a vehicle. Like, for example, in good times in Singapore, you can go and you can just grab a cab. And they are like 10%, 20% of traffic, those taxis. Ultimately, that's why you need to get to so that you get to a certain place where you really the benefits really kick off in like orders of magnitude type of a point. But once you get there, you actually get the benefits. And you can certainly carry people. I think that's one of the things people really don't like to wait for themselves. But for example, they can wait a lot more for the goods if they order something. Like you're sitting at home and you want to wait half an hour, that sounds great. People will say it's great. You're going to take a cab. You're waiting half an hour. Like that's crazy. You don't want to wait that much.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “But I think that's kind of important because maybe the couple zip codes, the one thing that we kind of depend on, and I'll get to your question in a second, but now we're taking a lot of tangents today. So I think that this is actually important. People call this data density or data velocity. So it's very good to collect data in a way that you see the same place so many times. Like you can drive 10,000 miles around the country or you drive 10,000 miles in a confined environment. You'll see the same intersection hundreds of times. And when it comes to predicting what people are going to do in that specific intersection, you become really good at it. Versus if you draw on like 10,000 miles around the country, you've seen that only once. And so trying to predict what people will become hard.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Like, for example, That's the density. So, meaning that if you see one vehicle, you look around, you see another one too. Imagine Tesla would tell you they collect a lot of data. Do you see that with Tesla? Like you just walk around and you look around, you see Tesla? Probably not.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “But I think one of the things that we really try to do is to take that shuttle experience that no one likes and tilt it into something that everybody loves. And so I think that's another important thing. I would like to say that carefully, just like teleoperation, we don't do shuttles. We're really kind of thinking of this as a system or a network that we're designing. But ultimately, we go to places that will normally rent the shuttle service that people wouldn't like as much and we want to tilt it into something that people love.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “That it's supposed to hit, and when you go on a specific route and all seeds travel together versus, you know, you have a whole bunch of them, you can imagine the route you can still have. But you can imagine you split up the seeds and instead of them traveling like, I don't know, a mile apart, they could be like half a mile apart if you split them into two. That basically would mean that your delays when you go out you won't wait for them for a long time. And that's one of the main reasons or you don't have to climb up. The other thing is that I think if you split them up in a nice way and if you can actually know where people are going to be somehow, you don't even need the app. A lot of people ask us the app. We say, why don't you just walk into the vehicle? How about you just walk into the vehicle? It recognizes who you are and it gives you a bunch of options of places that you go and you just kind of go there. I mean, people kind of also internalize the apps.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “They actually ran shuttles. And so you can ask anybody. The shuttle experiences terrible. People hate shuttles. And I can tell you why. It's because the driver is very expensive in a shuttle business. So what makes sense is to attach 20, 30 seats to a driver. And a lot of people have this misconception. They think that shuttles should be big. Sometimes we get that our optimist right. We tell them we're going to give you like four seaters, six seaters, and we get asked back, how about like 20 seaters? I'm like, you know, you don't need 20 seaters. You want to split up those seeds so that they can travel faster and they transportation delays would go down. That's what you want. If you make it big, not only you will get delays in transportation, but you won't have an agile vehicle. It will take a long time to speed up, slow down, and so on. You need to climb up to the thing. So it's kind of like really hard to interact with.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “But I think it has so much impact, the car in the space that we have. And I think we talked about sustainability, livability. I mean, ultimately, these kinds of places that parking spots at the very least could change into something more useful or maybe just like park areas, recreational. And so I think that's the first thing that we're targeting. And I think that we're getting a really good response, both from an economic, societal point of view, especially places that are a little bit forward-looking. And like, for example, Brooklyn Navy Art, they have tenants. There's distinct, they're called New Lab. It's kind of like an innovation center. There's a bunch of startups there. And so, you know, you get those kinds of people. And, you know, they're really interested in sort of making that environment more livable. And these kinds of solutions that Optimus Ride provides almost kind of comes in and becomes that. And many of these places that our transportation deprived”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Anywhere else, you're talking tens of millions of dollars. If you're smack in the middle of New York, you're looking at billions of dollars of savings just by doing that. And that's the economic part of it. And there's a societal part, right? I mean, just look around. I mean, the places that we live are like built for cars. It didn't look like this just like 100 years ago. Like today, no one walks in the middle of the street. It's for cars. No one tells you that growing up, but you grow into that reality. And so sometimes they close the road. It happens here. You know, like the celebration, they close the road. Still people don't walk in the middle of the road. Like just walk in the road and people don't.”

    2020-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #97 – Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source