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- In the automation space,
there's lots of interesting problems to solve.
Obviously we have investments in companies like
Agility Robotics who have a very practical,
very capable bipedal robot that can go with humans go
and we're developing applications for that robot
you know, Logistics is one but there's many other places
where you want to be able to have something
which can operate in this unstructured human environment
where it's hard or dirty or dangerous
and Digit has this radical mechanical design that allows it
to run for a long time on modest amounts of power.
So there's some broad applications
from Precision agriculture to Logistics to Life sciences
that we're making bets in.
- So, where in terms of like
people's does people's daily routines
when will they first start seeing like robotics
and automation kind of come in and kind of, you know,
touch them on a daily basis
and what areas do you think don't impact first?
- Today we live in environments where we have fabulously
capable and safe vehicles
which are entirely a product of automation.
You know, we have food supplies which depend on you know,
industrialization of agriculture.
So I think they will continue to be innovations
in automation which improve our lives
that don't look like robots walking around in the street.
We often think about when we think about automation,
about autonomous vehicles and other things
which are more intrusive like darkening the skies
with drones delivering pizzas.
And I hope it's a long time before those sorts of automation
things happen because I don't think
we want that from our robots.
Autonomous vehicles are interesting
I think people have misunderstood how hard
the last little piece of that automation is,
and I think it's gonna take many years
and many billions of dollars
for that technology to converge.
And I think there are certainly roles of technology
which are more immediate and more achievable
than sentient vehicles that can drive themselves.
- Was the like most exciting,
like the most compelling category of robotics right now
when you're kind of honing in on one.
- Well so one area that hasn't had an industrial revolution
yet is Life sciences.
If you look at a modern body shop right
Illinois Body Shop for example,
what's already 95% automated.
Incremental robotics in there is not gonna help.
And in some cases some of these guys
I think a little over automated.
In contrast Life sciences has these emerging
individualized therapies, which are essentially being done
in white-collar sweatshops
and those therapies are innovative and incredibly effective,
but they're also horrifically expensive because that process
is now a very manual process.
So I think there's a real opportunity to take the amazing
two other force, manipulators and AGVs and things
that we have automating manufacturing processes
and apply that with software and other mechanisms,
AI and other tools that we now have
to scaling out Life sciences to be able to get
individualized therapies accessible to everybody.
- Do you have any contrary in thesis
on investing in robotics?
you know, or like kind of like takes that maybe other
investors would kind of quibble with?
- Well I think there is, you know,
this problem where we often misunderstand
what's really hard for robots and what isn't.
We were very excited about Reinforcement learning,
lending robots the dexterity that we have,
I think we still don't know how to do nearly all of that.
So we try and look at the problems,
which really are solvable, which either people don't realize
are problems or just overlook
because they think the robot can do it already
and that has to do with dexterity and intelligence
and it's gonna require new tools and it's gonna require
new investments to give the robots
the cognition they require.
When we look at you know,
at a Agility, Digit or a Boston Dynamics, Atlas,
because it looks like us and because it moves like us,
we think it thinks like us and it's dumb as a bag of nails
and we have a big gap to fill there.
- Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
- Pleasure.
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