00:00Your robot is kind of humanoid like a little, but not totally.
00:06How does it differ from other robotics?
00:09Yeah, I think we just think about safety as a really high priority item.
00:14And we define it as being like passively safe.
00:17And what it means is that you can put the robot into any configuration
00:21and you can cut power and the robot will still be stable.
00:24So this is why we built this whole mobile base as opposed to Lex.
00:29Where did you ultimately come to decide that this was the way in which you should think about robotics?
00:36Maybe not in a humanoid manner, maybe just with real safety first.
00:39You've got a stellar background. You're at Google DeepMind, Tesla Autopilot, Google X.
00:43You're also, of course, just coming out of stealth with a cool 30 million to put to work.
00:50Yeah, I think the biggest way we think very differently is actually on how to train these robots,
00:55not just the design, but how it obtained its intelligence.
00:59So normally people train their robots through teleoperation,
01:02which essentially means that you kind of log into the robot and control how it moves.
01:07But the way we learn is actually very, very different, that we learn from humans directly.
01:12That's essentially we design these device, a glove, that captures how humans do their chores.
01:18And we're able to transfer those data directly into the robots.
01:22And that's how the robot is able to learn from hundreds of humans simultaneously.
01:27These robots don't come cheap.
01:29But interestingly, Tony, you're not looking to sell immediately.
01:32You're looking to beat a test.
01:34Now, how are you finding the right people to bring these robots into their home?
01:39Yeah. So if you look at our website, we actually have a huge signup doc for people who are interested.
01:47And we already got more than a few thousand of these applications.
01:50So what we're going to work on next is to like very carefully sit through all these applications
01:56and find people who what we call like founding families will be there to give us feedback,
02:02will be there to kind of shape what a product will look like in the future.
02:06What do you think the hardest element for these robots is?
02:10The hardest element?
02:13I think it will be how people will react to this like big robot in their homes.
02:19And again, this is the first time that anyone has put a mobile manipulator like a robot with arms into real living homes.
02:26And this is something that we're incredibly excited about.
02:28I think we'll be people will be pleasantly surprised by how useful it is.
02:32Why do you think so many tech companies do end up turning to humanoids to turning to the physical form of a human rather than a more stable basis you have?
02:44Yeah, I think if you're working on environments that with a lot of stairs or you're working on environments with like, you know, like hills, I think having Lux will be helpful in that case.
02:59And for us, in our first product, we decided to go for a real base just for the simplicity for lowering costs and to allow us to move faster.
03:08Talk to us about costs.
03:10You have managed to raise seed funding from Sarah Gow over at Conviction.
03:14You've now got money coming in by Benchmark.
03:17What is the key cost for you? Is it the talent? Is it the hardware? What is it?
03:22Yeah, so our hardware is actually quite differentiated from a lot of humanoids.
03:28Even at quantity zero, when we prototype it these days, it costs around 25K to make.
03:33And at quantity around like 5000, we're able to get a cost to below 10K.
03:39So I think we'll be ending up selling it around to five to 10K in the final price.
03:44And this is we're thinking about robots, not like another car like purchase, but more like a fancy smartphone or a laptop.
03:53How does American ingenuity when it comes to robotics stack up to that of Asia and China and how are you seeing your own supply chain develop?
04:02Yeah, this is a great question. I think American has incredible mechanical engineers, software engineers, but we are lacking in terms of some of the supply chain infrastructures.
04:14So I think we're at the point that we need to leverage some of the growing supply chains, the humanoids in China.
04:24And we actually share a lot of components with them so that we can have the economy of scale before us shipping like millions of robots.
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