The GPT Moment for Robotics Is Here

Physical Intelligence is building a foundation model that can control any robot to do any task — what the team describes as the GPT-1 moment for robotics. The company's cross-embodiment approach trains across many different robot platforms, and recent results show tasks being performed zero-shot that last year required hundreds of hours of data collection. In this episode of The Lightcone, co-founder Quan Vuong sat down with Garry, Jared, Diana, and Harj to talk about why robotics is finally ready for its scaling moment, how PI runs its models in the cloud rather than on-device, and the playbook for what Quan sees as a Cambrian explosion of vertical robotics companies.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The equation, I think, for starting a robotic business has changed and will continue to change at an accelerating pace. Because the upfront cost is not that high anymore.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Everyone's sort of spending a lot of time in the digital world. And it feels like, you know, now is the time to start thinking about the world of atoms.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  You literally just gave people the playbook for how to build a vertical robotics company.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  This has really been our mission from the start is to create that Cambrian explosion.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  It still like blows my mind. I didn't know if this would exist even in my entire lifetime.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. Today, we have a very special guest, Quan Vuong. He's one of the co-founders of Physical Intelligence, which we think might be the robotics AI lab that brings about the GPT-1 moment for all of robotics. Quan, thank you for joining us.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Pleasure to be here, has been a longtime admirer of YC. And our mission is to build a model that can control any robot, to do any task that is physically capable of, and to do so at such a high level of performance that's going to be useful to people in all walks of life. And so GPT-1 for robotics, you know, what is it? You know, is the ChatGPT moment for robotics real? Our perspective here is that we want to build a model that's really intelligent. We want to build a platform that allow us to externalize that intelligence to the rest of world and allow them to use it to build very interesting application in all sorts of vertical and robotics. And we think that it's going to be more like a peeling and onion analogy,

• 1:45Speaker 00

  where you start from a really strong base model that have all sorts of common sense knowledge and already works to some extent on your robot. You have then a mixed autonomy system, very similar, for example, to an autonomous driving car today. And then you actually deployed a system to do a real job. That system might make mistake, it's okay. And then over time, by actually exposing the system to the complexity and the edge case of the real world, that system get incrementally, even just slightly better over time every day. And you know, one day you wake up and you suddenly have a system that is just fully autonomous and just provide tremendous value.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  Might be helpful to give the audience a bit of a mini history lesson on why robotics is so hard. And there's been a lot of breakthroughs in the last two years. And I mean, just to simplify, the robotics problem is three pillars. Semantics, which I think we got a lot of locks and with language models that somehow we ported into robotics. Then you have the planning. And then the last thing is control, which needs to be done in real time and interact with a environment that changes. Walk us through the seminal papers that a lot of the team of Py Robotics publish that gave you the inkling that the GPT one moment is near. And that started in 2024.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the dream to build general purpose robot, like robots, has been a long time dream, I think, in humanity. Like, you know, we're not the first to say that our mission is to build a model that can work on any robot. And we're really fortunate to be in this moment in time in history where we feel that it's possible. To kind of walk back a little bit, a few years before, there was, I think, the first is CICAN, which to me was the first demonstration of language model and how you can bring all of the common sense knowledge in language model into robotics. And therefore, that significantly kind of reduces the need to collect robot-specific data. So for example, if you have a task of, oh, I want to go to the Y C office to record a

• 3:49Speaker 00

  podcast, you know, what are the steps I need to take? You can ask a language model, you know, just show me the steps and show me the plan. And that worked incredibly well. And then the way kind of language model infiltrate, if you will, in robotic is it start at the planning level, at the semantic level. And then, but there's still the control problem, you know, at the end of the day, you still need a mechanism to convert the plan into low-level action that can actually accurate the robot. And that bring us to POM E, and that bring us to RT2, which stands for robotic transformer two. And what this two work really show is that if you start from a vision language model that is really powerful, and you kind of use robotic data to adapt this model to speak

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Robot language, if you will. Then you see a lot of transfer from the kind of knowledge that exists in the language, in the vision language model down to the low level action. Like, one of my favorite example, when we did the RT2 project was you can have picture of celebrity on the table. If you have a picture of Taylor Swift, you have a picture of the Queen of England. And you can ask the robot, you know, pick up the Coke can and move it to Taylor Swift, even though the concept of Taylor Swift is just doesn't exist in the robot data at all. And that work, you can do other examples such as kind of spatial reasoning that doesn't exist in the robot data at all. Like, for example, move the dinosaurs next to the red car.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  And these are always completely unseen object in robot data. And so that was RT2 and that was POM E. Now, RT2 and POM E are single embodiment exercise.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Just for the audience, single embodiment, meaning it worked for a very specific robot?

• 5:33Speaker 00

  It worked for a very specific robot. In robotic, you can ask the question, how do you scale? Especially how do you scale data collections? And one of the insight that we had back then was, you know, maybe the data from one robot is not that different from another robot's anyway. If you have enough robots in your training data, maybe what the model learn isn't to control one specific robot. What the model learn is something that's more abstract, which is how do I kind of learn a general notion of what it means to control any particular robotic platform? And therefore, I will be better at controlling any particular platform. And that bring us to what we call Open Cross Embodiment and Robotic Transformer X.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  That was a big paper because it was the first that showed potential scaling laws that apply to robotics because now you could start training. All these models across multiple kinds of hardware, not just one, which has never been done in robotics ever before. Because from all the research labs, they would all train with a very specific set of sensor actuators and motors. And it was all very finicky with that particular hardware, right?

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of the really interesting results from Open Cross Embodiment, and let me provide the context here, is that you can take, let's say, 10 different robot platform, collect data from them, train a policy, and really optimize the policy to work well on that platform. So let's say you have that, you have 10 different platform, 10 different policies. And now if you simply take the data and absorb it into a model that is high capacity enough to really absorb that data, and you can compare. You have this generalist, right? That learned to control how to tend the 10 different robot. You can compare it to the specialist that has been optimized to work well on a particular embodiment. How does it compare? And the interesting result from OpenX is it was 50% better.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  And that was really surprising. Because in robotic, it's hard enough to get your model to work on one particular robot platform. And one of the reasons why I say that we're really fortunate to be in this moment in time in robotic is because OpenX was really only possible because of the support that we received from the robotic community. It was a huge collaboration across the robotic community. And the reason why that's really important is there is this joke in robotic grad school that, you know, if you want to add two years to your PhD, just work on a new robot platform. You know, by that logic, if you want to have 10 robot platform, that's 20 years.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Why is that? It takes like a year or two to just get the platform up and running to even collect the data?

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Is it fair to say that the dataset that was created from embodiment X is similar to the scale of an impact that

• 8:22Speaker 03

  ImageNet did for vision because it was huge and it was the first large dataset across multiple hardware, huge collaboration.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  I still think that ImageNet was more impactful in the vision community. And the reason for that is a few. The first is that ImageNet also allowed for reproducible evaluation. Right, you know, OpenX as an effort was more about making data available for kind of people to use. And evaluation is a really difficult problems in robotic that OpenX did not solve. And the second is I think OpenX is a drop in the bucket at this point in the robotic community. If you measure in the kind of the scale and the volume and the diversity of data that the community is collecting, I think OpenX at this point is a drop in the bucket.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess we started talking about sort of GPT-1, but even GPT-1, you know, that was sort of this moment where you can prove, you know, Alec Radford figured out that there was a neuron based on a very specific input and output. And then that allowed the scaling laws to sort of take hold. The biggest problem in robotics I've heard is basically actually exactly what we've been talking about is like it's the data problem, you know, language you could bootstrap off of like, you know, the sum total of what you could get off the internet, which is actually quite a lot. Can you give us like a sense for like scale? Is it like petabytes? Like, you know, what do you think is necessary as an input to, you know, the true GPT-1 of robotics?

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the data scarcity problem in robotic, there's a few ways to look at it. The first way is that it's really two problem in disguise. There is a generation, data generation problem, and there's data capture problem. And the difference is that the data capture is that there might already be lots of robotic data that is being generated, but there's just never been really an incentive to capture it, to make it easy for digestion in training. And that's one of the goal that OpenX was trying to solve, which is if you have robotic data, it's a really good idea to capture it and make it possible to train on. The second way to look at it is that robotic It's very different from language model. There is not an internet of robotic data that you can use.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  And so you see this kind of very operationally heavy effort to collect data. And there's the question of is it going to scale? Well, the way that I look at it is, let's take the US GDP, twenty four trillion US dollars. Let's say if we actually solve robotics, a model that can control any robot to do any task. Napkin math maybe contribute ten percent to US GDP. Well, that's already a massive number. And I, I think that promise is one of the reason that warrants the investment into data collections in robotics. And the third way to look at it is we're very focused on cross embodiment.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  And cross embodiment, there is the data collection aspect of as well, which is to really make sure that your model and your organizations and infrastructure are set up to consume data from many different sources of, of robots. And that actually allows you to scale easier. For example, if I were to contrast our approach compared to, let's say, a company that have a particular hardware platform that they optimize for and they scale. And it, it's not an approach that have really allowed people to scale. Because it's just much harder to figure out how do you manufacture like a thousand unit of something for now compared to making sure that you yourself are ready to absorb data

• 11:59Speaker 00

  from like a thousand different types of robot that are already in there, in the community.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a crazy problem, isn't it? I mean, the hardware itself, even within the same design of embodiment. If there's a hardware run that goes awry or like one of the servos is slightly different, like you see it in the data, right? And then how do you control for that?

• 12:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think we were doing kind of like an inventory of robot in the company. And we were so shocked to find that there are no robot, no two robot platform that are the same. And if you ask people in the royal committee, sometimes there's debate about multi-robot versus single robot. And the argument is that, you know, single robot is simpler to scale. And actually, that's not how it plays out in practice, like how it plays. In practice is even if you have a single robot that you're optimizing for over time, that platform is going to drift. You know, maybe you want to make hardware change or you have software change. You end up in a situation where it's much harder for you to reuse old data. Because you know, in machine learning, if you want to generalize from a distribution, you would like many sample from that distribution.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  And if you just have one robot platform that have a major change every three months, maybe you have a few data point from that distribution. Whereas if you start from the hypothesis that if you have many robot platform in your fleet, your model is going to learn something more abstract, which is how do I control a robot, not any particular robot, then the model will be able to ingest data from, you know, a slightly different robot bearer.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  And actually, we're starting to see emergent property in this kind of robot large population.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  That's good news.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  We're doing where you start to see like interesting transfer between different data sources. For example, today it's possible to perform task zero shot. Zero shot, meaning you don't collect any data. And these are the tasks that last year might have required like hundreds and hundreds of hours.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  What are some examples? Yeah, do we have any videos we can see that like?

• 13:54Speaker 00

  So you know, I get my some flack when I come back because this is not published result. Hopefully this will come out soon. So you know, I want to reserve the excitement for that. And I'm kind of like building up the excitement a little bit. So hopefully this will come out soon.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  All right.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  These are not simple tasks. These are like actually difficult tasks that just last year required like hundreds of hours of data collections.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  You hear here on Light Cone first that there's some emergent properties that are going to come out of pie. Can you give us a sense of like the flavor of the tasks?

• 14:24Speaker 00

  It's really easy to fool yourself. And so we wanted to test across like few different tasks of different flavor. A task that require precision, task that require reasoning with multiple objects in the scene. It all seems to have this property that's really nice. So it does seems like that's something that's kind of a more general property that emerged rather than we just, you know, got lucky and suddenly the model started working on one particular task.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Could you help us understand where we are now in terms of like what's working and how well it's working? Like we're not quite at the chat GPT moment yet, like where are we? And I think you brought some videos that you were going to show us to like help everybody visualize what the current state of the art actually looks like.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  I think where we are is I think if you have a task where it's okay for the robot to make a mistake. And it's possible for you to set up a mixed autonomy system where you have a person that takes over when the robot make a mistake and provide corrections. It is possible to get to a level of performance where it starts to make sense to think about scaling robot deployment. And the example that I specifically want to highlight here is this blog post that we did with Weave and Ultra. And you know, it's great that these are both Y C company. I want to provide a little bit of context here first. The context is that Pi is a primarily research organization. We want to focus on building the best model.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  But we also want to not be tunnel vision. We want to make sure that the model that we built actually going to be useful and actually perform tasks that people in society cares about. And one of the really good way for us to do so is to partner really closely with company that want to get robot out there today. And the way that these relationship work is that we treat each other like we're on the same team. Very free flow of information. And we design a system that try to get the best possible performance for the task that these company care about. So let me talk about We first. What you're seeing in this video is a system that we built together folding really diverse item of laundry in a real laundromats in the mission.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  You can see, you know, people walking outside. And why this task is difficult is because there's just infinite possibility of observation space. Like, you know, clothings are deformable and not two item of clothing here are the same. And these are also unseen. You know, these are not like clothing item that are seen in the training data.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love this team. They are some of the most cracked people out of Apple I've ever met.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Gary was the partner of our Weave. Maybe you want to like explain like what Weave is and what their like, what their like company is.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they're actually, you know, shipping their first robots into the home. We sort of talked about it as, you know, being able to do household tasks like this. And I think they were very inspired by Physical Intelligence's first demos with, with laundry folding. So it's actually a total trip to hear about it, you know, a year ago. We were talking about them doing it. And then now to see them do it working in hand in hand with you is really awesome. I think this is a great example of like, you know, you need the model smarts, you need the data collection and then the hardware and the sort of system integration all working together is just hard to nail. So.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. And to get back to your question about why robotic is hard, it's really, it is a really hard system problems. Like you need everything to work well and work well together to get this result. And like, Weave is such an incredible team for us to work with to get this result. And it actually didn't even take us that long to get this result. It was roughly where we set a goal and maybe it was like two weeks afterwards where we got a model that was, got a model and a system that was good enough at performing this task.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  It still like blows my mind to see a robot actually folding laundry because I remember until, basically until ChatGPT, I didn't know if this would exist even in my entire lifetime. Cause like folding laundry, I mean, it's, it's always been like the Turing test for robotics because there's no way to like deterministically program a system the way that you did like pre-AI to do this because the space is like so infinite. And like, we've shown that it's possible for us to do, like basically if a robot can do this, like robots will be able to do everything. It's only a matter of like improving it from here.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  There was a funny story where when we first published Pi Zero, people thought of us as the laundry company.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Because the demo was just focused on laundry and actually picking home tasks, especially tasks that has to do with deformable object is a very intentional choice on our end. We're not just after the home, we really want to make it broadly applicable. But picking home tasks for us to start with has a few benefits. Like one is relatable. You know, you can see the laundry folding demo and you can kind of like grok how this is going to be useful. And you can get a sense of why it's hard. And the second is that it's really easy to set up to test generalization.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  You can talk about Ultra, which is your company, Jared, a demo of it.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is Ultra. The thing that I love about this video is you see it's bright outside. And you see this is 4X speed and it's 100 minutes. If I scroll to the end, the sun has set.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. That was one of the big problems in robotics, where it would be so sensitive to the environment in lighting and mess up the vision system, the semantics and part of it.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the interesting thing here is that it is possible to get to the level of autonomy that the robot is just performing the task. This is autonomy at scale, like this is ready to be skilled.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Quan, because this task is less familiar than laundry filling. Do you want to explain what the robot is doing here and what Ultra is like doing as a company?

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Ultra is a company that wanna makes it really easy to adapt robot to, you know, new task. And right now they're focusing on logistics space, which is really important because there's lots of labor shortage in logistics. And the task that we focus on together here is, you know, if you order an item from Amazon, you sometime get this soft pouch that item gets shipped from. And the task here is you have a tray of these items here and the robot is supposed to pick one of them at a time and place it inside this pouch. The machine would then close it and then pick up the pouch and put it on the left here to be ready for shipping. Now, this heart is hard because there are many different types of object that can be in this tray.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  And the opening here is actually very narrow. So you see this interesting example of the robot kind of nudging the item to go into the pouch. And that's, that's really hard, like that require very good understanding of the scene and like very precise motion to nurture the object into the pouch. The other thing that's hard about this task is the level of autonomy that's required. Like this is running for an entire day. There is still human intervention, I wanna say, in this like full day operation. But the level of intervention is actually quite minimal.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  This is not just like some like demo station, right? This is actually recorded in an actual e-commerce warehouse where they're actually shipping real products to real customers. This isn't just like a, like a lab.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  This is. Packaging real customer, real order for customer to be shipped out in a real warehouse. So this is real operations.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  So I think this is really cool because I think when people think about robots, they tend to think of the consumer use cases like we, because that's what we're familiar with in our daily life. What I find really interesting is that there's like a million applications like this ultra thing that you wouldn't think of. It's obviously like, oh, who packs the like soft pouch of things that you get from like Amazon? Well, there's some person like who does that? And this is like a job that we could have built a robot to do.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  The interesting thing about the approach is that you're converting it from a very difficult engineering problem into a operation problems of how do I identify the use case? And how do I collect the right data? Which is in some sense more scalable because you can build the system that allows you to collect data for many different tasks. So it's now a problem of how do I scale data collection? Rather than for every new task, how do I design a really difficult engineering system to solve it?

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Y C startup school is back. We're hand selecting the most promising builders in the world and flying them out to San Francisco for July 25th and 26th to discuss the cutting edge of tech. Apply now for a spot. Okay, back to the video. I think one thing that the audience may not know is that you have a very unique technical insight that in the past robotics folks would have kind of gasped and be shocked. Because robots need to run in real time. A lot of times, all of the compute runs in on device. But you guys have done something very different. Can you tell us more about that? So that this works in real time with large models and really well.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  So the context here is that we talked to many companies that would like to deploy robots. And one of the first question we get is what compute units should we get on the robot? You know, it's expensive, it's going to increase the bomb cost. And they're worried that it's going to go out in fashion very quickly because the model changed, the model gets bigger. How do I make sure that the hardware that I'm going to commit to today is going to be viable for a couple of years? It's a very difficult questions. People are often really surprised when I tell them that almost all of the robot evaluation that we run at Pi today, including the really Complicated demo that we have shown making coffee, folding laundry, mobile robots navigating around. The model actually hosted in the cloud. And you know, this is not like a cloud as in a server in the office. It's a real cloud.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  The model is hosted in a data center somewhere. And within this high frequency control loop that is controlling the robot, the robot is actually querying an API endpoint that hosts the model, sending it images and language command and getting back action that then executed directly on the robot. And this is surprising because of precisely the reason that you mentioned. You know, how do you actually make it work? This is why it's really important for Pi to couple system hardware and model development and research like very tightly together. Because like it allows us to solve for this problem. So for example, one of the insight that we have here is that you can actually bury the inference time within the robot control loop.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Because you know, if I'm a robot, I have enough action for me to execute for the next hundred milliseconds. Like there's no reason for me to wait until I finish executing that action to ask my model for a different action. You know, I can do it as fast as inference essentially. And so, you know, maybe when I only have fifty milliseconds of action worth left, I can ask for the next set of action. And when the current fifty millisecond is over, like I have something that's ready for me to continue with, you know, my next one hundred milliseconds. So that's one of the inside. The other kind of algorithmic improvement, we refer to them as real time chunking. Design inference in such a way that you know there's going to be a delay

• 25:41Speaker 00

  in how long it takes to query the model on the cloud, basically. Like the problem here, if I get a little bit more technical, is an action chunk is a sequence of action that I can execute on the robot. So you know, it's not just one action. And if I have an action chunk that I can execute for a hundred millisecond and fifty milliseconds in, I want to predict another action chunk. And I'm going to transition to that new action chunk after my current fifty millisecond is over. How do I make sure the two are consistent? Like, you know, how do I make sure that if I'm moving this way, the next action chunk is going to continue me to allow me to continue to be smoothly moving this way?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  You can pre compute.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can pre compute and like that's one of the algorithmic improvement that we've made to make inference using model hosted in the cloud possible.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  I studied computer engineering, so I'm not really an algorithms person. But when it comes to systems like that, like pipelining, like get me all over that. That sounds great. That's so interesting.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  I mean, this simplifies, it's kind of, it's a brilliant choice because it simplifies so much of the system for the robots. You don't need all these clunky, I don't know. People have two operating systems that sometimes for, for robots embedded, RTAS and then the regular one and all these complex giant compute and power. And this is what the initial versions of Waymo used to run basically a server on the trunk. And you can't afford to do that with general day robotics, which is brilliant that you figure out how to do it.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't have to. I mean, you can do things, some of it, there obviously has to be some compute there, but a lot of the compute can happen elsewhere. And then is there, there must be a video of like this, this thing that we're looking at in the top left, like how much of that is sort of like video feedback, how much of it is like local processed? I mean.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Is there any compute locally on this robot? Or is it just like a dumb like video camera that's streamed state of the cloud?

• 27:32Speaker 00

  For this, I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I am inclined to believe that it's just a dumb computer. Like for this specific video, I don't remember, but I'm just a hundred percent confident that we can make this work with a dumb computer on the robot. And the, one other interesting thing about our collaboration with Weven Ultra is one, I've never seen their robot in person.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Two is I have very little idea about how their robot actually works.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  And that's a very intentional choice. I want to stay away from, from that as far as possible. I also don't know how they collect data. Like I intentionally don't ask them this question to understand whether it's possible for an organization like Pi to parachute into their existing system and to work really closely with them on the thing that actually matters to get the system to work and not have to learn about how they've set up their system, because in a way that's like a more scalable recipe.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, you completely decouple a lot of the hardware control loop choices from the, from the semantics and planning, which is just works, just brilliant.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm really surprised. It works. And when when we started the company, we thought that real deployment is gonna be a it's only gonna be in the conversation like five years into the life of the company. Because the problem is it's really hard and we're two years in and this is the result that we have and and real like deployment and scaling the number of robot is a really serious consideration today. And so the pace of progress has just been very pleasantly much faster than we expected originally.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Often on this podcast, we talk about like what all this means for startup founders. I think that might be an interesting question for us to explore here. So if you imagine someone was listening to this podcast, maybe they're like a college student that's studying computer science and they think robots are really cool and they want to do something like this. How should they get started and what are the skills that they need? Do they need to be a mechanical engineer to be able to build a robot like this? Can they just buy an off the shelf like robot arm and camera system and like? And load pie and you're often running in like a day.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Before I actually answer your question, let me provide a few more context. The first is that robotic is traditionally really hard because it's an extremely vertically integrated business. You need to have your own customer relationship, your own hardware, your autonomy stack, your own safety certification, your own everything. And the barrier to entry is just really high because of that. And one of the thing that we're trying to change is that we're trying to provide a foundation of physical intelligence that the community can build on top of that allow them to onboard autonomy onto their robot and their task much quicker than before. So that's the first, you know, we want to provide that kind of

• 30:24Speaker 00

  seat of intelligence that allow people to move much faster so that they can, you know, focus on other problems. And the second thing is that

• 30:33Speaker 00

  The, I think the recipe for starting a vertical robotic business today is one, have a really good understanding of the existing workflow, because the robotic system needs to fit into existing workflow. And the second is to be very meticulous about identifying where the opportunity is. You know, if there is a workflow that need X number of work today, you know, where is the robot when you insert it's going to make the biggest difference. And two is to really be scrappy when it comes to hardware and data collections. You don't need a incredibly expensive robot that is capable of very precise motion today to be able to do this task. And the reason why is this model are really reactive.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  And so they can compensate for some of the in accuracy in the actual robot movement. And to ensure that you have the ability to collect data and to run evaluation, especially evaluation in real deployment. The next step after that is to get a mixed autonomous system that allow you to get to the point where it's break even.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Like break even economically.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Break even economically. Because the reason why that's important is because it allow you to then scale the number of robot.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Because if you lose money on every robot, it's very hard to scale.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  That has been historically one of the biggest challenges for robotic companies as they go into growth stage. It's just the payback hack period is just doesn't make sense.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the equation, I think, for starting a robotic business has changed and will continue to change at an accelerating pace. Because the upfront cost is not that high anymore. And now, you know, what is the upfront cost? The upfront cost is much cheaper hardware, ability to collect data, ability to collect evaluation and ability to kind of like understand the use case to see where they should insert the robot. You know, it's not about having incredibly expensive hardware. It's not about having your own proprietary, I think, autonomy classical stack anymore to be able to do this task. And so it allow company to focus on the component

• 32:37Speaker 00

  that will actually allow them to differentiate themselves from the rest of the space.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Now that you've sort of unbundled it and you no longer need to build this fully vertically integrated company in order to build a robotics company, are we on the precipice of a Cambrian explosion of vertical robotics companies where there's going to be like a thousand companies like Ultra going after, you know, every like menial job in the economy and like getting a deep understanding of the customer, building a robot that can solve that problem, doing like mixed human machine deployment until it like can run fully autonomously and building a company in every sector. Is that the future that you see people building on top of Pi?

• 33:13Speaker 00

  It's funny that you mentioned Cambrian explosion because when we wrote this blog post, there was that term that's very kind of like hotly debated. We are, I think, academics at heart and we want to be kind of very measured when we communicate. But, you know, myself personally, I believe there's going to be a Cambrian explosions of robotic company across the entire world, across many, many different verticals, just because it's just so much cheaper to build and it doesn't require, you know, someone with 20 years of experience in robotic to start anymore. You know, it require someone that is really scrappy, that can move really quickly, can do the system integration, can understand customer what

• 33:57Speaker 00

  they want to start the deployment.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  I mean, what's coming up for me is obviously we work with a lot of robotics companies and to meet a lot of founders and it feels like there's this continuum. One is to use an analogy to personal computing. You could argue that industrial robotics today is basically like mainframe or mini computer level. Like, you know, if you look back in the seventies, huge public companies like digital computer that, you know, just did like these sort of very, very expensive deployments, but like they were very, very specialized and it was all extreme enterprise. Like, you know, the idea of a personal computer was ridiculous, right? You know, it took the Altair and then Apple One and Apple Two and then IBM CXT to like

• 34:42Speaker 01

  create personal computing. And then like the traditional advice for robotics for many years is like go after like dirty and dangerous. And then, of course, those are sort of the industrial cases. Like, you know, you have these giant Tesla robots in the Gigafactory and things like that. It feels like what you said around profitability is really, really big. So, you know, does that mean that? The people who do the vertical robot Cambrian explosion sort of moment, the people who are sort of first in that, like, it sounds like they would be the first to be profitable and not dirty and dangerous.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  I think this is already happening today. I think we have the fortune of having lots of visibility into the robotic community because, you know, people would like to talk to us. People would like to learn, you know, what it's like to build a foundation model for a robotic. And people would like to know, how do I get the same level of autonomy? And there are so many companies and businesses that we talk to that would love to put a robot into their space, that, you know, it's okay for the robot to make a mistake. And this is needed so much. I really believe that the recipe that I mentioned earlier of identify where the robot can fit in, focus on cheaper hardware, collect data, run evaluation, mix autonomy, break even, scale robots,

• 36:05Speaker 00

  will work across many different vertical. And I'm seeing it play out today. And it's just incredibly exciting to see.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  And this is pretty cool that you literally just gave people the playbook for how to build a vertical robotics company. Like, this is a playbook that could possibly be followed successfully hundreds or thousands of times.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  And the reason why I want to mention it is because I do want to see that Cambrian explosions. And we want to help enable it. You know, for Pi, if we talk about why Pi is going to fail, it's probably going to be because the problem is just way too hard. You know, maybe it'd take 50 more years to solve the robotic problem. And, you know, not a couple of years, five, 10. And so we want to enable the community. We want to accelerate progress. And that's why we're very open. We publish our research. We open source Pi Zero and Pi O Five. And people also shocked when they asked me, you know, is there any difference between Pi Zero and Pi O Five that you open source versus the model that we use internally, Pi Zero and Pi O Five? And the answer was, I actually, no. It's the same model.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Like, the pre-trained model weights that you're using, that we open source, is also the pre-trained model weight that our research internally use for Pi Zero and Pi O Five. And so we really want to help accelerate progress in the community and to create that Cambrian explosions.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's very inspiring. I mean, I feel like that's, uh, everyone's sort of spending a lot of time in the digital world. And it feels like, you know, now is the time to start thinking about, you know, the, the world of atoms. And, uh, this is sort of the perfect mix of actually like, you know, how do you take electrons and turn it into abundance in the, you know, atoms world? And I think about Dario Amade's essay, um, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. And when you really think about the perfect manifestation of that, it's not like, you know, perfect, uh, agents that look over you, just like in the electronic world. It's, you know, actually something a little bit more akin to what we're seeing here.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, and this has really been our mission from the start is to create that Cambrian explosion. Um, and, you know, this is why we choose to focus on the model because we believe that is the bottleneck to just really make robot useful across many different, different tasks in the world. And that's why we also focus on cross embodiment, you know, success for us is not defined as only our model on a robot performing task that is useful. The, the surface area for success is actually much larger, which is our model performing really useful tasks on somebody else's robot out there. Maybe that we, we don't even know what that robot is like in a way that's like useful to the end consumer.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  Could we maybe talk a little bit about, um, like the humans behind the robots here? How did the company get started? Like who are the, who are your co-founders? How do you get together? And what skills do you each bring to such a complex problem?

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Sometimes the joke I make here is that the human behind the robots are also robots. Not, not really. Yeah, so Pi is a very, I would say, untraditional company. We have a like larger than average founding teams. And some of us worked really closely together when we were at the robotic team at Google. And the robotic team at Google was, I think, a really, really great environment for seeing the sign of life and creating the relationships in the community that allow the robot community and like these advances to flourish. There is Lucky, uh, which we met when we uh were thinking about starting the company and he's just been really instrumental in making sure that we're a good business.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  And there is Adnan, our hardware lead, um, that came over from Android. And Adnan has a really difficult job because if you want to work on cross embodiment, you remember my uh joke about how if you want to add two years to your grad school, you bring on one more robot. The, the hardware problem and the operational problem for us is how do we build, improve, and scale a fleet of heterogeneous robot, you know, it's just not one robot platform. And because we built the organization from scratch in the beginning to, to, to support that, like, I think we're able to do it, but it's just a really hard uh problem. Um, because there, there's just like no two different robots in the fleet. How do you make sure that everything runs smoothly?

• 40:26Speaker 00

  We're really good at divide and conquer, if you ask.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  But so how many, how many co-founders are there in total?

• 40:32Speaker 00

  We have Brian, we have Chelsea, Sergey, myself, Lucky, and Adnan.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Is it just necessary to have that many co-founders to solve a problem as big as this, or was it a case like you were already sort of like a unit together, you'd already worked together and you just, whatever you started, you would all have?

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, one common question that we have is, you know, why band together? And, you know, the first is that we really enjoy each other company. Um, we spend a lot of time at work and it's, you know, in some sense, give meaning to life. And so we really want to enjoy the relationship we have at work. Um, and the second is that, you know, any one of us could have started um a company and be successful, but the problem is just so incredibly hard. And the chances of success is just so much higher that we band together and we can divide and conquer the problems. Um, and, you know, that's the, I think, one of the main reason why the progress has been much faster than, than we expected.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  What were the differences of um you working before in either academia or a big?

• 41:38Speaker 03

  Industry, big company like Google and I suppose do now in a startup. Because this is the first time for a lot of you doing a startup, right?

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is the first time for a lot of us. One of the really surprising thing that we learned when we started the company is that the infrastructure for supporting large scale, general purpose robot, which is not there. And you know, this start from the software itself. How do you collect data? What device do you use to collect data? How do you manage the data? How do you annotate the data? How you get visibility into the data? How do you run evaluation? How you build operational process? Like, there wasn't company that offered this kind of services, which is very different from software. And we were really surprised to find out. And so we end up writing a lot of the software at Py ourselves. But I think this is another area of incredible opportunity of kind of building services

• 42:31Speaker 00

  for robot company. Like, you know, if you can offer remote telegraph, for example, if you can offer data collections, if you can offer annotation service. Because, you know, these are functions that doesn't need to be repeated from one company to the next. So I think there's lots of opportunity to build kind of support for growing robotic business. So that's one thing, like one surprising thing that I learned. And the second is, I think, one of the reason why we have managed to achieve such progress is that there is a really tight loop of collaboration in the entire lifecycle of model development. Going from what task do you collect data for? You collect data for the task, how do you do it? What hardware do you use?

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Once after you collect the data, how do you get visibility? How do you ensure data quality? How do you then make sure that you can easily train on that data? After you train on that, how do you run evaluation? Evaluation is really hard problem in robotic because it scales super linearly to model capability. Like, let's say you have a model that can perform a two-minute task. Running evaluation for that is very different from running evaluation for a task that's 20 minutes. It's not 10 times harder. It's more than 10 times harder. Um. After you run evaluation, how you can, how do you can like distill the learning from that evaluation to know how to improve the, the model further? Like, one of the really side project I would love to take on is to build an automated

• 43:58Speaker 00

  robotic research scientist.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Um. Which is really one of the bionic we have today because thi- this is a really difficult skill set um that require intuition about the entire stack. So, you know, I would love it if there is a model that can ingest multimodal data such as this and analyze filler modes, um, you know, understanding, oh, is the robot performing this way because of the data that was collected, or the way that it was annotated, or the way that we trained the model and then, you know, suggest idea and actually try them to figure out if, you know, those hypotheses are correct, or that's something that I would love to have and would like dramatically unlock us. So sometimes I make the joke in the company that we should record all of the meetings and then.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Train, train a model to, to basically just make prediction about what is the next set of experiments.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  You could, you totally could. What if it's OpenClaw and um obsidian and markdown files and like, you know, a brain dot M D with like ontology that's custom to your use case? And what if it's a hundred open claws in the background that you orchestrate?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  I think there's two sides to this. The first is that we already see a little bit of a sigh of life where for simple filler modes um during evaluation, if you can describe the way that the robot fail in text very precisely and very clearly, then, you know, you can ask a language model to make very reasonable recommendation about what the next step is. Um. But the, the flip side is that this only works for simple cases today. And the reason why that's the case is because I think it's pretty fundamental limitation of the model that we have today, which is that they are not at the core model that take action in the world and see the consequences of its own action, especially action that changes the physical world.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  Um. And, and so I, I think this kind of very fundamental understanding about how the physical world works is missing from the really large foundation model. Um. And, and I think that, that's one of the ingredients that's missing to, to be able to build this automated robot research scientist.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  What's interesting about OpenClaw? I don't know. I mean. Basically, it can go and it can just do things, which is interesting. And then at that point, it's on the research lab to provide like, you know, CLI, MCP endpoints to the things that might control robots or reconfigure rooms. Or, I mean, I think Karpathy feels like he's, he's starting to talk a bunch about this, where, you know, if you mix auto research plus what he's been talking about with markdown files, like, it might just happen in the open. Like, you know, there's this sort of sense that you have to make something much, much more complicated to make it work, but what if that's just wrong? What if we just have markdown files and agents?

• 46:43Speaker 01

  And, you know, you could make it yourself with, you know, literally Claude code and MCP today? What if it's not an algorithm problem? It's just literally an integration challenge?

• 46:54Speaker 00

  We have a version of this internally that I use a lot. There was a point when I was spending a embarrassingly large amount of money on API queries.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  And, you know, my team was like, Juan, what are you doing?

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm that guy at Y Combinator right now.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  So to give you an example, we have a Claude skill that essentially serving the role of a pre-training on-call today. So, you know, we have these pre-training runs that are really large. It's very, I think, a difficult exercise to keep them alive, to, you know, for them to continue to churn, just because there's so many things that can go wrong. And we have a prototype, a pre-training on-call, that kind of babysit the run and have the permission to take action to remedy error that it see. And one of the surprising outcome of that exercise is that it leads about 50% improvement

• 47:53Speaker 00

  in compute usage, like, just overall compute utilization for that large pre-training run, which is huge for us. And, you know, this was just a small, simple prototype that I built, and I think like there's a lot more to be done.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Kwon, this is incredible. Thank you so much for everything. Thank you for making physical intelligence. Thank you for showing us these incredible demos. And honestly, like the thing that gives me the most hope is this idea that there's an entity, there's a research lab out there that is focused on giving this to the world, about to create this Cambrian explosion of robotic startups. So someone watching right now will be inspired by this and start playing with your models, and they might create a robot that touches billions of people's lives for the good.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. To the listener, the one takeaway that I want you to have is I think robotic has changed a lot, and the cost of building in robotic has decreased and I think will continue to dramatically decrease. And it also required a very different kind of scrappy skill set that young startup needs. We hope to enable really an explosion of many, many, many different robotic use case. And always reach out to us if you want to collaborate.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. Thank you.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Thank you.