Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…And you're not doing driving as a job. Imagine if you're a commercial truck driver or you work in a mine or you work... There, a little bit of intelligence, a helping hand in that very dangerous task, it's incredible. And I think there's something about the human brain where when you bring up that reality of self-driving trucks, immediately people are like, "Well, what about the trucking jobs?" Now, needless to say, we don't have enough people who want to do that job. So leave that fact to the side. I think the fact that you really focus on is the fact that people die from trucking accidents. We can't throw out the baby with the bathwater. And so I think I implore everybody who thinks about AI broadly and physical AI specifically to always recognize that your monkey brain is programmed because of hundreds of thousands of years of living out in the wild and being in the cave that when you hear the rustle in the bush, that is you think it's a snake because that's what our ancestors were programmed. So now when something new enters our psyche, your view isn't, well, if mines became autonomous, well, wouldn't that lose jobs? It's like, those are awful jobs that people die in. And the best evidence is that people don't want to work in them. That's the best evidence. Nobody's clamoring to go work in a mine in a remote area. And so intelligence can help make that reality much, much better. People are seeing AI advance in all these different ways on the software side and they see all these models being released. It's driving 100% of people's code now. What's really cool about you is you see the hardware side of this, and I think one of the biggest changes to our lives will probably be robots walking around doing things for us. Do you have a sense of just how close we are just robots around us day-to-day? So I would think about this, the framing here matters again on a spectrum. So there are robots around us like Roombas, that clean your carpet where you're sleeping. There's robots around you when you make a coffee, that's an automated machine that is taking an input and doing a bunch of things based on what you need. So what you're really talking about is how fast can we go up that spectrum to where you have a robot that can take on lots of tasks with little guidance. And the way that I would think about this is, let's say we're sitting in, this podcast is happening not in 2026, but 2006, and you're asking me the same question about mobile and you say, "Well, mobile is coming." This is, remember, pre-iPhone, which comes out in 07, everyone has got those flip phones. So we have mobile. It's not like a completely... So we have some robots around us already, but it's like, okay, so when are we going to... And you asked me in 2006, "When are we going to get that Star Trek phone that can do everything?" And I think at that time, I would say, because I don't even know the iPhone is coming a year later, I would say, "Well, Lenny, I don't know. Maybe it's one to five years." And if it's not five years later that Uber, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat are all products and they're being consumed by many, many, many millions of people. So what happens when you think about sitting in 2006 and why can't your brain figure out that Instagram is coming? Instagram is very hard to even conceive without phones that have an app store, have cameras on both sides are available, generally available that lots of people have it. And the fact that people are comfortable being on social networks. In 2006, it's still an early thing. This is pre-Twitter and Facebook is not that big and MySpace is, but it's not the same type of private kind of communication. And so the point I'm making is I think it can come pretty fast, but the way and the form factor will come is hard to pick just like it's hard to figure out Instagram's going to happen because the intelligence in that particular type of hardware, which will be generally available, that's a keyword, generally available, is really going to impact the use cases. So I think the most obvious use cases that will come early are going to be use cases where you get the most amount of bang for buck. And the bang for buck is a car that drives itself or a mining robot, which is a mining vehicle, which is now intelligent. And the reason is all that, let's say engineering required to make this giant machine that moves dirt has already been done. It's been done over the last 50, 60 years. So then you're just putting a little bit of intelligence into it and leveraging everything else that the companies and people have developed. So I think, and I'm not just pitching my own book. I mean, we're a physical AI company. I continue to believe that I think our brain emotionally loves the humanoid concept because we're monkeys.…

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