Inside the AI Garage Powering the Real World

We got rare access inside Applied Intuition’s commercial garage with Co-Founders CEO Qasar Younis and CTO Peter Ludwig, where they’re building AI systems that power cars, trucks, mining equipment, defense systems, and more. In a never-before-seen tour to the public, Applied Intuition showcases where/how real machines across industries are being rebuilt with AI. Valued at $15B, Applied Intuition is one of the most important companies in physical AI, powering 18 of the top 20 global automakers and deploying autonomy across automotive, trucking, construction, agriculture, and defense. Inside this garage, you’ll see: Self-driving cars, trucks, & heavy machinery Autonomous mining & construction operations Defense systems & remote-controlled fleets A unified operating system running across every machine Qasar and Peter break down how one platform can run everything from a car to a boat to a mining site, and why the future of AI is no longer just software, but systems that move the real world. This is what “atoms” looks like. Qasar Younis: https://x.com/qasar Peter Ludwig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterwludwig https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterwludwig/ Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube : https://youtu.be/XhuG-xhw94A 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery•VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio athttp://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery https://public.com/sourcery • Merge https://merge.dev—The leading provider of customer-facing integrations and agentic tools for frontier LLMs, Fortune 500 organizations, and B2B SaaS companies. Visit https://merge.dev Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga http://public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Inside Applied Intuition physical AI garage (03:00) Cars are a wiring mess (04:31) Why modern architecture matters (06:30) From simulators to autonomy (07:50) Real-time autonomous operations (08:34) AI solving labor shortages (10:09) The mobile AI command center (12:50) How defense became a core focus (16:20) Becoming more public (17:10) Connecting mines, ports, and roads (19:07) Driverless trucks in Japan (20:09) Why they don’t operate in China (21:40) Which country is adopting fastest? (23:00) Scaling a 1400-person AI company (25:43) New vs old AI players (27:49) "Bits are out, Atoms are in" (29:40) Physical AI is just getting started (32:06) The "Japan corner"

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Applied intuition. Applied intuition.

• 0:04Molly O'Shea?

  What does applied intuition do?

• 0:08Molly O'Shea?

  We have a fence, we have auto, we have trucking, we have mining, we have agriculture, we're on the sea. It's like, what the?

• 0:32Molly O'Shea?

  Kassar and Peter, we are here at the Physical AI Day.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 0:38Molly O'Shea?

  And you're gonna show us around. I guess you call this the garage?

• 0:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is actually, it, it looks really nice today, but it's actually a, a working garage. You have a couple of large garages that we do all of our, you know, all of our work in, working with both physical vehicles and obviously testing and all of that stuff. But yeah, this is the garage. Uh, it's the only place where we, we wear our shoes. Yeah.

• 0:57Molly O'Shea?

  I saw that there's a station over there. Everybody's shoes are in cubbies.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's from the early days in the company, but we've been doing it for a long time now. Also to give credit where credit's due, I think Gusto also did this in parallel, but I'm not sure they still do it. So, uh, but yeah, we, we were in a house in the start of the company. And, you know, we literally had people, including Peter, living in the house. Uh, and, uh, and then probably a year is when we actually got our first office and we're like, let's keep the cleanliness going. And also I lived in Japan. And in the office in Japan, you take off like your clothes and you have like a uniform, a work uniform. And then you have your, you know, work.

• 1:35Molly O'Shea?

  What are we gonna get? Some applied intuition workwear?

• 1:39Speaker 03

  Uh, we have workwear already, but we don't force everybody to wear it all the time. But if you go to Japan and you like go to like Honda, every employee is wearing like the same uniform, engineers. And then they're wearing a flat eighties hat that says Honda on it. It's fantastic. I feel like if we do that and we start doing like calisthenics in the morning, I, it's gonna be a little too off-brand for Silicon Valley. You'll only fully appreciate that if you've been to Japan. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's all true. Yeah, and it's fun. Yeah.

• 2:08Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so we're here in the auto center.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11Molly O'Shea?

  Big sign. Let's talk about this.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  So today, uh, we had our first ever Physical AI Day. Historically, we've never invited people in to our garages and things like that. And so when we thought about, okay, now how do we show what we're doing? We have all these different sections and this just highlights a little bit of what we do in automotive. We All of our major product lines are also available in automotive. So that means the, let's say, the developer tooling you would use to write software and deploy it onto vehicles. That's one of our, one of our products. Vehicle operating system that abstracts hardware and software away from, you know, from each other. Kind of like you'd have on a laptop or on a phone. That type of operating system is also something we do in automotive. And then, of course, self-driving. We do self-driving in automotive. And we do it from L2++ all the way to full autonomy. But yeah, this is the auto section.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  And if you look behind you, you'll see kind of the, the kind of the guts of a, guts of a car. Peter, you want to talk about this?

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so here we're just showing, this is a production vehicle that's disassembled and just has all of its electronics laid out.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Hence, it says before.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  A traditional vehicle, exactly. And you can see just the, the mass of complexity and, and wires and...

• 3:20Speaker 03

  This is really what a car is and the guts of the car.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 3:22Molly O'Shea?

  It looks like a mess.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  It is a mess. Yeah, yeah. And I think if, if, you know, if, for the astute viewer, you'll see all of these cables and you're like, why do you have so much wiring harness when, you know, typically it can be much more simple? That's a real, what's it, legacy of the existing supply chain. If you're a company that sells, let's say, a backup camera, you're not only going to sell the backup camera, you're going to sell all the wiring that goes to some compute. And then you have to do that for the, your windows that go up and down, the sunroof. And that's why all this is complex. But in the after, what we do is we actually take all of that compute that's disparate around the vehicle into essentially a, you know, a contained one box. It's not precisely a one box, but for, for all intents and purposes it is.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  And then you can run very few cables to that one box. And that box has higher performance compute in it and has all the signals from the vehicle. So then you can do really interesting things. And including just abstracting hardware and software away from each other, which allows then developers to develop apps for the vehicle in a way that you would like. For a laptop or for a phone.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  And so making a vehicle with an old architecture fully autonomous is a lot harder than doing that on a modern architecture. And so when we're working with our customers, one of the goals is, well, you want to modernize and simplify the architecture, and then you can add autonomy and all of the AI capabilities on top of it.

• 4:46Molly O'Shea?

  And so who are some of your customers you're working with that are now modernizing their vehicles?

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Yes, earlier today in our presentation, we talked about Solana as one of those customers. And there's a bunch of others globally as well. There's different amounts of things that we're allowed to say about them because we are in the background.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're in the background a lot of them. And the companies obviously compete against each other. And this is like a part of their business as well. Of the top 20 global automakers, 18 are our customers. So vast majority of the industry is using some components here to modernize their actual products from just tooling to the full operating system to intelligent cabin to autonomy.

• 5:28Molly O'Shea?

  And so what's the difference if something goes wrong in an old car versus something goes wrong in one of these?

• 5:35Speaker 00

  So in an old car, right, you might have, let's say, an airbag sensor or something that don't function.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  I used to work on airbags. My first job as an engineer.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  And maybe you get like a little icon on the dashboard that you don't really know what it means. And maybe you're looking at the manual like, okay, what's the problem here? And on a modern car, you can have a much more sophisticated diagnostic system, a much more sophisticated way of servicing the information to the user. And then also with AI, we can also then surface that to the manufacturer, and they can understand across their entire fleet, what are the aggregation of the problems that they're having and root cause those things. And I think we won't necessarily go into the deep details, but these are some of our R and D and showcase vehicles. And it's the middle vehicle here is a showcase vehicle for what's called our vehicle operating system. And then this is a self-driving vehicle. This can

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Drive on urban environments and highways, it can park itself and it's a demonstration.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Maybe we talk a little bit about what's our approach?

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we started in 2017 initially building simulators which were used for developing self-driving technology and we sold the simulators to the whole industry and then a few years later, we really got deep into building the technology ourselves. And what's unique now is we're able to use what's called end-to-end technology. So we can take raw sensor data in and actually put out vehicle control signals. And then we have a large-scale data collection across a bunch of industries, not only automotive, but also trucking and mining, construction. And we can combine all of this data together to create these self-driving models.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the thing that's maybe less obvious is that actually what this vehicle does and what we see in that boat over there and the cars that you saw and the trucks that we have, they're actually fundamentally the same thing because they're machines that interact with the real world. And so physics is consistent. And so we've built a platform that can run across all of these different industries and bring that same level of, for the lack of a better word, Tesla-ification to a machine like this, which is self-driving, intelligent, easy to work with.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  So the same operating system and platform really runs across all of these vehicle types. So like literally on this tractor and then over here, if you take a look, this is actually we're showing in real time, we have actual construction and mining equipment doing autonomous operations at our test site.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is being streamed in.

• 8:13Molly O'Shea?

  This is real.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  This is real, yeah. These are real-time video feeds, yeah.

• 8:17Molly O'Shea?

  Let's see what he picks up.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what we're doing what's called a load haul dump cycle, which is basically the movement of earth. And this is all happening autonomously and these operators can control a whole fleet of vehicles remotely here.

• 8:33Molly O'Shea?

  So what does this mean for the future of industrial work? How many people will be actually on site?

• 8:40Speaker 00

  So the future of mining and eventually construction is going to be these fully autonomous operations where labor shortage is a real problem in the industry. And so this allows a very small number of people to control a huge number of vehicles.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, the AI kind of problem and consternation and heartache and kind of hand wringing that exists that's existing right now with what happens with white collar workers with these super intelligent agents that are running and what's going to happen to jobs. It's quite difficult in the physical AI community because farmers are aging. People don't want to work in mines in faraway places. These are dangerous jobs. And so AI really in these industries is being kind of pulled out of our hands because they're real problems that they're dealing with and and technology can help solve those problems, whether it's labor shortages or safety or whatever it might be.

• 9:40Molly O'Shea?

  A lot of people talk about the negatives for AI.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 9:44Molly O'Shea?

  But this is obviously a positive.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And because I mean, the reality is, you know, there's not a new group of, you know, people who are really want to become farmers.

• 9:55Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  It's just, it's just not there.

• 9:57Molly O'Shea?

  There's only so much propaganda we can put on X for that.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 10:03Molly O'Shea?

  All right, it's a little bit darker in here.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  Yes, it is.

• 10:07Molly O'Shea?

  Where are we now?

• 10:07Speaker 03

  What is this, Peter?

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is what's called Applied Edge. This is our mobile command center. And so all of the, all of the development tools and infrastructure that we are typically able to use to build interesting defense technologies at, say, in an office environment, all of that is packaged up and can run completely offline, off the grid.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  In a shipping container.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Exactly. And so this can be transported on a C-130. It can be transported on a ship. It's a standard container, which is easy to move, and it's fully self-sufficient. So it has its own power, has its own cooling, and it has all of the software and server technology all built right in for operations. And here we're actually showing a real operation. We have actual boats out in the ocean, which we are remotely controlling and doing patrol operation.

• 11:01Molly O'Shea?

  Does it come with the people in it?

• 11:05Speaker 03

  They're laughing, but they don't want to look back.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  She's been controlling this boat for probably a couple of hours, just going in circles.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  But yeah, it's a real boat being really controlled.

• 11:18Molly O'Shea?

  Really cool.

• 11:18Molly O'Shea?

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• 12:04Molly O'Shea?

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• 12:48Speaker 03

  So this is a kind of our defense.

• 12:50Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Defense area. Yeah.

• 12:52Molly O'Shea?

  When did you guys get into defense?

• 12:54Speaker 03

  We originally got into defense pretty early, actually, like 2018.

• 12:56Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, 2018.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Somewhere in there. So pretty early in the company's history. Our work in defense accelerated when we acquired a company called Epicai.

• 13:04Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  This was about, well, now, two years ago. Yeah, yeah, something like that. And, but yeah, we work with All the major branches of the military, we also work with primes. There's projects we sub on, there's other projects they sub with us on, but we're really everywhere in the defense ecosystem in the U.S.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  So this is a Ford Raptor, an F-150 Raptor. So it's a rugged off-road vehicle. We use this actually as our development vehicle for our Off-Road Autonomy Stack. And we also do some really interesting production applications of this. So recently, we showed a collaboration with Sierra Nevada Corporation, where we actually had like an anti-drone missile launcher on the back of one of these trucks.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, what's roughly happened in defense is if you're using commercial technologies like a Ford F-150, those are also very dangerous because they're not actually made for combat. And so then putting humans in there becomes not really an option.

• 13:57Molly O'Shea?

  Is that a normal thing? That's normal?

• 13:59Speaker 03

  No, it's something that's new within the administration, which is let's use lower-cost products. But then you don't put people in them. And they can be, they can run autonomously out to the battlefield. And that's actually, just in terms of, you know, affordable mass, that is the right strategy. That's a correct strategy. And I think that age of really expensive, monolithic systems, I think, is gone. I think our dual-use strategy, and it's truly a dual-use strategy in the sense of we are taking commercially available products, which we sell in all these other verticals, and we're also selling them in defense, and we're optimizing for the defense use cases. But we can frankly deploy, you know, more robust systems because they're already in

• 14:43Speaker 03

  field and in production for a fraction of the cost that actually get the same mission accomplished. I think one way to think about this in defense is imagine if the Department of War said, let's build a chat app. How long and how many dollars would it take to compete with WhatsApp? Or Signal or something like that. This is extremely difficult. There are real advantages in the commercial ecosystem. We get disciplined by the commercial side of the business because we have to compete against everybody. We have to compete against the low cost vendors, all the way to the high cost vendors in the West and the East, everywhere. And because of that, like our, our technology has to be the best. It can't be just the best that's selling to the D O W.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  It has to be the best in the world and then also the best selling to the D O W. Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  And this is an autonomous boat. It's actually the same kind of boat that we actually have in the ocean right now and we're showing in that.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  It's not this one with like some A I or something.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have a fleet of these. But obviously this is, this is unarmed in this setting, but there's a lot you can do with this kind of vessel.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Should we keep moving to the other, other areas? Yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's take a quick peek outside and then head back in.

• 16:02Molly O'Shea?

  Should we go to the big mining truck?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  All right. How are we going to get there? Are we going through?

• 16:09Speaker 00

  We'll go through this way.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Before it gets dark.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, before it gets dark.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  What's most surprising to you?

• 16:21Molly O'Shea?

  For this?

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, as you walk around.

• 16:23Molly O'Shea?

  Honestly, I just think it's kind of crazy. You guys have been under the radar for so long and then you open up the garage doors and it's like, we have defense. We have harbor, we have trucking, we have mining, we have agriculture, we're on the sea. It's like, what the? How did that, when?

• 16:37Speaker 03

  It's a real company. Look at, look at these guys getting their, their, he's actually our first, he's our first employee and he's, he's, he's back seeing. He's, I, I think, I think he's really looking at this as like, should I, should I, should I really bank on this stock for the rest of my life? I think he's going to.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  So they're, they're doing self-driving car rides so you can get driven around town.

• 16:57Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, fun.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  All right, look at this beast.

• 17:01Molly O'Shea?

  Big.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is a Komatsu truck. So funny enough, like you might think this looks like a big truck. This is actually a small truck.

• 17:08Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, tiny.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Smallest truck we could get in this parking lot.

• 17:11Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  So this is, this is actually technically not even a mining truck. This is a construction truck. So we do work also in mining trucks, which are much, much larger than this. But yes, the same operating system and autonomous technology that we do in automotive and these other fields, we also put onto this kind of vehicle. And yes, it's obviously super valuable in the industrial domain.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, what's going on over here?

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Yes, this is an autonomous skid steer, which is an incredibly useful vehicle. So if you're, if you're not in construction, you might not be as familiar, but skid steers, there's like a hundred different tools that can be placed on the front of these. So they can do almost anything. And a typical work site will have a whole bunch of these things. And in this example, we're autonomously moving around pallets. But just what you can do with this technology is almost unlimited. Once it's autonomous, you can do anything with it.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And I think the interoperability of our platform is really important because we can go from a mine, then, you know, to self-driving trucks, which ultimately go to a port. And we think automating all of that is really where there's going to be a huge unlock in productivity. I think automating some of these individual machines is positive, but unlocking all of them and then them working together is really powerful.

• 18:32Molly O'Shea?

  When do you think you're going to complete an end-to-end autonomous mission?

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, we're on that path right now. I think, you know, we are working in queries and mines around the world. We are, we have driverless trucks running in Japan right now. We obviously have, you know, driverless cars as well. I think in the near future, in the near future, yeah. It's only a matter of time. I think that we have like a mine, a road and a port and all connects. And we have, you know, we have automation in all three of those.

• 19:07Molly O'Shea?

  Just recreating the industrial fabric of the world.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  So let's walk around this way and we'll, we'll go into the trucking section.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. So. We have a public partnership with Isuzu, which is one of the largest commercial manufacturing manufacturer of vehicles in the world. They make trucks among many things. And we've been automating these. We run driverless trucks in Japan right now. Peter, do you want to talk about our Gen 2 vehicle?

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Gen 2, I mean, you can look, it's, it's, it's really nice. It's refined. This is basically one step before this is fully productionizable. And so they will produce this. This is being commercialized in the next year, which is super exciting. And Japan's an awesome market for self-driving trucks because

• 20:00Speaker 03

  A very aging population.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's a, there's a big need for this. So it's sort of the, and there's also support from the government. So it's phenomenal.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 20:08Molly O'Shea?

  What countries are you not working in? You guys have extreme global reach.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  We're not working in China. China is the only country that I think we probably won't be in maybe ever, but certainly anytime soon. Sometimes people say that's because we do defense work. That's part of it. Sometimes they say, well, you know, IP restrictions, that's, that's part of it. But yeah, all of that combined equals we don't have, you know, we don't, we don't have a presence in China. But everywhere else we do, and our, most of the areas of the world, we already have some presence. Our most recent kind of expansion has been Australia. We opened also in India and UK offices last year, about 18 sites globally. I think as we kind of look at the future,

• 20:55Speaker 03

  you know, Australia could be one of those, you know, countries where we're doing driverless trucks and we're doing a bunch of different, you know, ports. And suddenly you have that full connection happening where that, that efficiency is unlocked in a real way. But I think what I want to really do, and if we, if we can do it, it's a little bit of our goal, is once we get into automating, you know, parts of ports, then we could go to a LatAm country. And we don't have anything in Latin America right now, so maybe a Brazil or enter that region through mining. And so you can see we're kind of hopscotching like a board game throughout, throughout the planet. I think probably the furthest out is Africa. We don't have any business in Africa right now, but

• 21:35Speaker 03

  I think one day we'll get there. And then probably the closest to the Middle East. We're expanding into the Middle East, basically in real time.

• 21:42Molly O'Shea?

  Which has been the fastest to adopt and expand?

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Probably Japan. Our Japanese market has done well, which is also ironic or also interesting because lots of companies have said that Japan is a brutally difficult market. So I think, I lived in Japan. Our presence in Japan is a very local presence. It's not like we just took a bunch of Silicon Valley engineers and put them there. And then you have another difficult situation, which is, oh, you're going to hire Silicon Valley people in Japan, that's really difficult. The expansion in every one of these global offices is always kind of rate limited by, we take the folks that are in the Bay Area kind of for granted in the sense of, they understand equity. They want to work in high-growth startups.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Like, very few people would, you know, that are interested in applied intuition would also be excited about working at one of the large banks. Whereas if you go abroad, they really look at the fang as like, maybe a dream job. And so you're explaining the value of equity and the value of growth, things that you can offer as a young, small company that an older company can't. So that ends up being a little bit of a rate limiter. So, but we've managed to figure that out, you know, across lots of different countries.

• 22:59Molly O'Shea?

  How many employees are you at now?

• 23:01Speaker 03

  Globally, we're at something like a little under fourteen hundred. About a thousand of those are engineers. I think we are one of the largest physical AI companies on the planet. And then certainly in this form and fashion, I don't think there's anybody at our side. That's, that's nice because it allows us to tackle really ambitious projects. Like, it's hard enough to do self-driving trucks in the Bay Area. Try doing self-driving trucks halfway around the world. That's actually a challenge. And we're doing that in multiple, you know, multiple regions. But yeah, it's, it's, it's a real skill company. And probably our biggest offices outside here are going to be Japan, Tokyo, Munich. It's probably a battle between those two. Yeah. And domestically, it's Tare, Sunnyvale, and Detroit.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Because of obviously our automotive, our automotive roots.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  And DC and...

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have offices.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  We have actually quite a few offices in there.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have quite a few offices. Yeah, yeah.

• 23:56Molly O'Shea?

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• 24:41Molly O'Shea?

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• 25:26Molly O'Shea?

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• 25:42Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think about the new competition and the new entrants that are coming with this, like, I guess resurgence of the AI wave? How do you feel about the playing field now?

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, in many ways, we're one of those folks. We really... You know, got the zeal and adopted self-driving, kind of in a post-transformer universe in an end-to-end world. I think if you look, if you look at Waymo, Waymo used to be in self-driving trucks and then they closed that team down because the old way of building self-driving, those are, those are two almost discrete systems. Different sensor placement, you know, different vehicle type was enough to make it actually distinct enough where they had two separate teams. Today, you know, we have the same team, actually, the self-driving and all these different form factors. We don't have like this discrete team for these discrete

• 26:34Speaker 03

  form factors. So we're, we're one of the entrants, for the lack of a better word. And then I think it's been a huge kind of tailwind for us, honestly. We've, we've been able to build more efficiently, both in terms of data and more efficiently, both in terms of dollars and more efficiently in terms of people. Like, you can do a lot more today than you could three or four years ago. And so I said for a long time, because we sold tools for self-driving, that the best time to start self-driving was like in 2022, 2023. And after you say that so many times, it's like, if nobody wants this opportunity, we'll just pick it up as well and, and, and make it. And I think when we, we were so hesitant to get into, into the space because we really thought, we don't want any

• 27:19Speaker 03

  perception of competition with our own customers. But there's something important to clarify is like, competition is only when you're taken out of the same bucket. Our customers are selling to consumers or businesses. We're selling to other manufacturers. So we're not a competitor in that way. And frankly speaking, we haven't gotten any pushback, you know, after we've, we've joined the industry from a, hey, we can offer you models, we can offer you the self-driving tech. But yeah, so we're, we're one of the, the new entrants, for the lack of a better word. Yeah.

• 27:48Molly O'Shea?

  Peter, you were at Hill and Valley this year. The theme was bits are out, atoms are in. At least Dalian said that. And so how do you feel about, well, one, what was your experience at Hill and Valley? What was like the trend there, the theme, that kind of thing? And then how do you feel about atoms coming in?

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was my first time at, at Hill and Valley. So

• 28:09Speaker 03

  We do divide and conquer. I did last year.

• 28:12Molly O'Shea?

  I remember that. You went on a China tirade. Yeah.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 28:16Molly O'Shea?

  It's like they're tracking my cell phone.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm sure that is the case for a lot of people.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  I had a great time at the event. I mean, it's a really interesting just combination of people that they bring together all in the same place. From our perspective, right? So we are now doing a lot of meaningful work with the DOW and really all branches of the military. So I got a chance to speak about the things that we're doing. So like, for example, with the Navy, we do this thing called the Data Edge Collection Kit. So it's basically a system to enable the Navy to do modern data collection for training their own AI models.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  We do a ton of things with the Air Force and with the Army. We have some really, really good drone technology that's been now used and demonstrated in a bunch of things. And so I think we've been working at this for almost 10 years. And so this concept of Adams is not new to us.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  It's a bit of like.

• 29:15Molly O'Shea?

  Now people are naming their companies, Adam.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  I think what has changed.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Applied Blank or Blank Intuition. You know, I think they might have been inspired by something. But, you know, no, no hate to my fellow founders. Applied Materials existed before Applied Intuition. And they're like three minutes from us.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  I think simultaneously, I think the space itself is becoming cooler, which is great. And then also we're becoming more public.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Molly just off camera rolled her eyes.

• 29:47Molly O'Shea?

  Yes, he's cool. He's got lots of vehicles.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  But the thing is, this industry is really going to explode in the sense of we're just getting started in so many areas. Like, we talked about mining earlier today, and only 1% of mines are autonomous. So like.

• 30:07Molly O'Shea?

  Very dangerous job.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Very dangerous job. Yeah, the salient statistic there is mining accounts for 8% of, you know, work-related deaths on the planet. And it is nowhere near. There's a tiny, tiny industry relative to the amount of people that live on the planet.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Right. And the average American farmer is 58 years old, which is sort of a crazy stat.

• 30:32Molly O'Shea?

  Maybe it's a retirement job. Have we thought about that?

• 30:34Speaker 03

  I don't, I think, being from the Midwest, you know, like Carhartt and John Deere, you know, I went to undergrad at this place called the General Motors Institute. And GMI, let's say, is not a liberal arts college.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  It's not Brandeis or Pomona or something like this.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  The point, though, is really the only answer to these problems is we have to make better use of technology.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  And so we've been developing this tech now for a long time. And it has taken a while to finally get to this point of productionization. It's like this, this Gen 2 truck, like this is many years in the making. And, and again, the fact that this, even this truck is not the final production version. There will be one more, which will be the full production version. It's like, but we're getting really close. And when we're there, it's gonna be really.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think what I mean by our kind of Detroit roots, we both are from there. Is frankly, is we just know these industries emotionally. When you, when you go to a GMI, you're growing up in the business. When your father and grandfather work at General Motors, work in the auto industry, you just grow up in the business. And so it's not new to us in that way. And so it's, I think what's new to us is the, the technology that's new to everybody, which is taking these like really advanced, you know, AI systems and models and intelligence, and now putting them in these machines, which typically you don't associate with cutting-edge AI.

• 31:59Molly O'Shea?

  There's a man in this truck.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  Yes, there is. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

• 32:05Molly O'Shea?

  Do we want to talk about this truck, maybe?

• 32:08Speaker 03

  It's our light duty truck.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's.

• 32:10Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, the stat was like a little bit surprising to me, 70%.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:14Molly O'Shea?

  So maybe you should show that.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  That was a stat from the Isuzu CEO. Yeah, and yeah, light duty trucks are huge. They're a huge part of the market. This is a Pinot truck, but the same technology applies really everywhere. And this is a Komatsu Digger. This, I guess, is like the Japan corner, maybe.

• 32:35Molly O'Shea?

  Humanoid robot.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  And actually, yeah, the humanoid is not Japanese. But it's the same technology that's, oh yeah, there's a humanoid in the, in the Komatsu Digger. I didn't see that. That caught me off guard. Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think, but I, I think. You know, the Hill and Valley Forum, it's focused on defense. But if there was like a Hill and Valley for the manufacturers, it actually would be all kind of what this garage is. It's each of these sections, they all kind of deal with the same problems. If you look, you know, where, where we grew up, General Motors headquarters, technical headquarters, and General Dynamics land system technical headquarters are like two or three miles apart. And like in between is my high school. Like that is the ecosystem you grew up in. So like, that's not random.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  The reason is the things and the, the, the technology they use to build the tank and the, literally the technical experience you need and the engineers that you need are actually quite similar to the ones you need in the car business. And so that's why Detroit is kind of an interesting place because it was such a center of this kind of physical world. And in the Midwest largely, that's, you know, Caterpillar is based there, et cetera. So I think we've really, uh, I think that's, that's really a part of our DNA. Like in the, in the truest sense, where I think as much Midwest as we are Silicon Valley, even though I think when people meet us, you know, we've spent most of our lives in Silicon Valley. I worked at Y Combinator, we worked at Google. This is very, very Silicon Valley, but I think we're heavily inspired by, by our background or by our roots.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  By the way, it is worth saying, it's a shout out to Hill and Valley because that, that, you know, uh, program and that conference and that event has really become its own thing.

• 34:15Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  I mean, just a few years ago.

• 34:17Molly O'Shea?

  We, we can give Christian the shout out now?

• 34:19Speaker 03

  Yes. Also one of our investors, also one of our, it's 137 Ventures. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, it's become a real thing. It's, and I think, uh, if we only had a Hill and Valley for like all the other industries, it would be fantastic. But I think, I think they're doing a great job. Because what they're doing is not connecting Detroit in the Valley. They're connecting DC in the Valley. And, uh, and those bridges are very, very important. And I think as you go forward, the next five or 10 years. A lot of that bridge building will continue to happen.

• 34:49Molly O'Shea?

  Have you been to Reindustrialize? That's in Detroit.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's in Detroit. Yeah, we absolutely have in our.

• 34:54Molly O'Shea?

  The Chanola Hotel is gorgeous.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:56Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my gosh.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:58Molly O'Shea?

  Beautiful.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  I mean, shout out to Dan Gilbert for really making a lot out of Detroit.

• 35:02Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Putting a lot of capital on the line and turning the downtown around. It's really fantastic. Yeah.

• 35:09Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.