Thomas von Tschammer: observation

Transcript context

…Do you think humanoid robotics or robotics more generally is critical to this, especially on the unlocking the speed on the manufacturing side? I mean, I think there's a lot of different ways you could imagine unlocking more agility on the manufacturing side. How much do you think things like humanoids matter versus just kind of general intelligence that will also design the machine tools and, kind of bring all the same. You can kind of imagine the version that is like built on this. If humanoid robots are sort of the analogs of LLMs, you can imagine that's one kind of way that we get like crazy responsiveness from manufacturing. But maybe another is just that, again, the reasoning models bring all these same engineering paradigms to the machine tools themselves. And that, you know, is enough to kind of speed things up. No, so I do believe that robots will be in our critical when we think about manufacturing, the manufacturing aspects and the plants, right? Now, do I believe those need to be humanoid? I think it's a different story, right? I think we as humans, we are optimized to do a lot of things. Are we optimized to be in the plants? I'm not sure we're the right form factor. But I think that's a different topic in itself. However, I think there are still some breakthroughs to be done for robots and humanity to be actively useful at scale within plants. The first one are the AI models themselves, right? I do believe that we need to much more advancement into the AI models so that those robots can actively interact with the physical world and be efficient, right? We are far from being there right now in the industry. And then there is another question on the hardware side, right? About the autonomy of these robots, how do you make sure they don't overheat, right? Building a hand, I don't know if you've done it, but there's a lot of research in universities on how do you actually build a hand that is as agile as what we have, that is so great, that is durable. You need a lot of breakthrough also on the hardware side. We want them to be efficient at scale. It's going to happen, but I think that there is some work to be done in that area for sure. Yeah. But it sounds like you don't, to try to put a little bit finer point on it, do you think that we will be fundamentally bottlenecked if we don't have a highly generalizable physical intelligence, you know, that can kind of walk into a room and like troubleshoot some random thing and apply a wrench to something that, for a human mechanic, that wouldn't be so difficult. Obviously, robots really can't do that very well yet. Do we have to solve that part or can we, through sufficient intelligence, kind of take a more top-down route to highly efficient automation that doesn't require this like general purpose physical intelligence to be able to kind of patch things?…

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