No PriorsNo Priors Ep. 119 | With Applied Intuition's Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
105 min read · 20,718 words- 0:00 – 1:28
Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig Introduction
- EGElad Gil
(instrumental music plays) Kasra and Peter, thank you so much for joining me today on No Briars.
- QYQasar Younis
Thanks for having us.
- EGElad Gil
Thanks for having us.
- QYQasar Younis
I, uh, I came as casual as I could for the San Francisco- I was worried about you. You look, usually you're buttoned up. (laughs)
- EGElad Gil
(laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
You're wearing something nice. I was kinda- Thanks. ... I was concerned. Is everything okay? Yeah, it is. It is.
- EGElad Gil
(laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
Uh, two- two things. One is, you know, I wanted to fit in with the San Francisco vibe, you know, Sunnyvale. I, I usually dress more like Peter, to be honest.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah. (laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
(laughs)
- EGElad Gil
(laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
I, I think that's my outfit. Uh-
- EGElad Gil
(laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
... I think that's my outfit.
- EGElad Gil
(laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
And then secondly, you know, I g- I got this Carhartt, you know, thing. And I don't know if you guys know, Carhartt is suddenly cool. Uh, I got the memo from the, you know-
- EGElad Gil
Wow.
- QYQasar Younis
... Cool Club newsletter.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
It's a Detroit brand, if anybody doesn't know.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
We're representing Detroit in Silicon Valley.
- EGElad Gil
Wow.
- QYQasar Younis
So... (laughs)
- EGElad Gil
Nice. Very nice. Yeah, I just thought, um, I thought-
- QYQasar Younis
You're not impressed. It's okay. (laughs)
- EGElad Gil
(laughs) I, I'm extremely impressed. I thought it was one of those things where, um, I think you guys just raised at a $15 billion valuation.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
And so I thought it was more, like, kinda-
- QYQasar Younis
Woo!
- 1:28 – 11:08
A Primer on Applied Intuition
- QYQasar Younis
- EGElad Gil
(laughs) I mean, I guess, um, in general when I think about you also, I've known y- I've known you for, um, over a decade.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
I think I've led two of your rounds. And I, I feel like you're the most successful, most quiet company in AI. You've, you're now at over 1,000 people. You're in the hundreds of millions of revenue. You've been profitable the whole time, so you haven't spent a dime, I think, of any of the money that you've ever raised, which is pretty insane from a-
- QYQasar Younis
Unbelievable to me as well.
- EGElad Gil
... capital efficiency perspective. But we're trying to change that quiet part, by the way. Yeah, yeah, but you've been super quiet and stealthy.
- QYQasar Younis
We came up to San Francisco-
- EGElad Gil
Wow.
- QYQasar Younis
... and wore a jean jacket.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, welcome.
- QYQasar Younis
See, Mom? (laughs)
- EGElad Gil
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Could you tell people a little bit about more generally what you do? I know you have three lines of business around engineering, tooling, um, autonomy, and then sort of, uh, in-car-
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... uh, related product. Could y- could you kinda break down the origins of the company, how you got started, what you focus on, and just kinda give a primer? 'Cause I think, again, you've, you've accomplished an enormous amount.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
There's still a lot ahead of you, but my gosh, you've, you've done so much stuff.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah, I mean, one of, by the way, this is, uh, directly for founders more than anything else, is that there's a huge value in, especially when the company is young, not to be constantly out there. I'm sure there's downsides as well, like people don't know you, and it's harder to recruit or whatever. That's never really been a huge issue for us. But the advantages you get is, you can operate, you know, the moment you say, "We do X," there's an expectation you do X.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
Even if X ends up being wrong.
- EGElad Gil
Uh-huh.
- QYQasar Younis
And so I think that, like, it's like, you know, keep your identity small kind of view. And so yeah, the c- company, uh, Applied Intuition is a $15 billion, we just, uh, raised, $15 billion profitable AI company. And what that, what we really do is we're, uh, we're in, we build vehicle intelligence. So, it's a broad category of how do you take this, uh, you know, all the positive things about AI that we're seeing in, you know, in LLMs and in chat, and you take them into the real world. So, how do you put intelligence into cars and trucks and tanks and fighter jets? And, uh, and it's roughly is those three business lines. So, we originally started with engineering tools in order to build and deploy that type of, you know, intelligence into vehicles, uh, and test it and validate it. Because unlike your laptop, um, these are safety critical systems.
- EGElad Gil
This was initially stuff that was built, I think, for the self-driving world, right? You were doing simulation-
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah, and then-
- EGElad Gil
... environments and-
- QYQasar Younis
Exactly. And then we expanded it to all software in, in the vehicle. That's broadly what, what the company does. In terms of what's unique about the company, I think is, we've always thought pretty deeply about building products that are going to be used-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
... quickly. If you're in the AI universe, especially in eight, nine years ago, in the autonomy universe, a lot of research happening. And research can be, um, super exciting and actually quite, uh, what's, what's the word? Like, losing huge, like, metric tons of money without actually... You know, you can convince yourself you're doing some really, really impressive things. But how do you describ- how do you describe the company?
- EGElad Gil
Really quickly, just underlining engineering tools, our vehicle operating system, and then autonomy and applications. And so we started in engineering tools, but you sort of reach a point where in order to make your engineering tools better, you actually need to be developing applications yourselves, because that sort of informs you and, and if we're really getting to the next generation technologies. Um, and then it comes to, okay, well, I want to run these applications on vehicles, and well, we need a great operating system. And we think that we can do something better than anything else in the world. And so that's sort of how we ended up with those three business areas.
- QYQasar Younis
I mean, there is a company that executed this strategy, is Microsoft.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- 11:08 – 12:04
Applied Intuition’s Customers
- EGElad Gil
one area that you have. Uh, are you, are you able to announce any customers that are working with you on this? Or-
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah, I mean, publicly we have a bunch of customers. Publicly, our, our, our, the, the hero customer that we'd come out with was Porsche. So, I think everybody knows them.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Uh, uh, generally considered to be the most competent OEM on the planet in terms of, um... You look at a Ferrari. A Ferrari will make more dollars per vehicle 'cause it's truly a luxury good, but, um, Porsches are the most profitable cars on the planet. They, there's $30,000 to $40,000 in profit per vehicle. So, they found that sweet spot of high volume and, you know, ability to charge a lot because of the brand. Uh, and I think, you know, a company like that is getting pressure from, uh, Tesla that says, you know, people are looking at those. And even though they're very different products, people are, are, are looking at those. And so, I think we're helping them offer, you know, offer, uh, a consumer experience which is at par with or better.
- PLPeter Ludwig
And I would say it's, it's, uh, pressure from Tesla and also the upstart Chinese companies. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening
- 12:04 – 15:44
Impact of Chinese Vehicles Manufacturers
- PLPeter Ludwig
in China.
- EGElad Gil
How do you think about that? So, I think one of the big shifts that's happened globally is this rise of Chinese manufacturers like BYD, Xiaomi-
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
Actually launched a car, I think, within five years, which is pretty amazing, 'cause I think they were, like, cellphones and other sorts of hardware, but they never really did anything in, in automotive. Um, the claim is that these systems are actually pretty good on the self-driving side and in a variety of other ways. Um, you know, what, what do you view as the global impact of these Chinese car manufacturers rising up?
- QYQasar Younis
Lots of nuance here. Um, so number one, they are good. So, the car business is extremely international. This, uh... And what I'm s- going to say next applies also to truck, tru- and construction and mining. But in the '80s and '90s, the big boogeyman was Japan.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And if you grew up in Michigan, in Detroit like us, that's all it was. It was Japan's coming. They're buying Rockefeller Center, and you know, they're... we're gonna all be working, speaking Japanese soon. Obviously, it didn't happen.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Uh, then it was the Koreans. So, 2000 to 2010 was Hyundai is coming and all the conglomerates there.
- EGElad Gil
Kia and things like that.
- QYQasar Younis
Uh, yeah, exactly. Uh, Genesis, et cetera. That obviously didn't happen. Right now, uh, the newest version of that is China. There will be another one. Either it'll be Vietnam or India or something will-
- EGElad Gil
Uh-huh.
- QYQasar Younis
... come after China. So-What the, the, the upstart wants to do is they, they look at the industry. They don't have any legacy platforms, and so they can enter the business with a blank slate. And you get a lot of advantages to that. You don't have all of these, you know, you don't have m- m- hundreds of millions of vehicles out there you're servicing and maintaining and brands that already have some legacy to them. Um, and that's allowed them to, with this EV shift, introduce, they being the, the, you know, the, the, the Chinese, uh, uh, Communist Party and broadly the Chinese ecosystem, to introduce lots and lots of brands at lots of different price points that all have pretty impressive products. Though what it's not... So the autonomy stuff, you know, we, we, we go to China regularly, and we test drive these vehicles. Super impressive.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
And, uh, better than Tesla, to be like very, very clear.
- EGElad Gil
On autonomy or other features?
- QYQasar Younis
On auton- and other features.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
All around, all around, like super impressive. I think if you look back at, you know, Elon, some of his statements about... He's seen the same thing over the years.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Uh, and then you can just honestly look at the sales of Teslas-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... in China. There's not, it's not that impressive.
- EGElad Gil
Sure.
- QYQasar Younis
It's because if you go there and you do the comparison, the local stuff is really good.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Now, the stuff that's not talked about often is there is subsidies that are happening. The, the, the Chinese consider this to be a national, uh, asset. They look at, you know, the car business as a, as we look at defense.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And they're willing to subsidize it, and they're w- Because fundamentally the car business, in some ways, and any of these manufacture, are their like jobs programs.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- 15:44 – 20:49
EV Policies in the European Market
- EGElad Gil
you think that impacts, um, sort of the economies of some of these countries? So if I look at the US, I th- I think we're very lucky. I, I have a Tesla. I think it's a fantastic car, and I think it's almost like a local champion in terms-
- QYQasar Younis
It is, yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... of EV and economy in the US.
- QYQasar Younis
It's an American cr- car company, by the way.
- EGElad Gil
(laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
People forget that. People only think the American car companies are in Detroit. Tesla is an American car company.
- EGElad Gil
Tesla is an American... Is an amazing American car company.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
Um, in Europe, it feels like they're much more threatened by the Chinese OEMs in part because they're letting them enter the markets, right? In the US, there's heavier tariffs around it or, you know, other means to sort of prevent access in Europe. It, it feels like certain markets are pretty wide open and you see BYD and others gaining share really aggressively. Is that a, uh... How do you think about that from a policy perspective in Europe? And is that, you know, not gonna really hurt the economies there?
- PLPeter Ludwig
I think they made it, there's a-
- QYQasar Younis
A resident European. (laughs)
- EGElad Gil
(laughs)
- PLPeter Ludwig
(laughs) I mean, I think there, there's always a question of, uh, right, trade and trade deficit. And so, um, I mean, European companies as well as American companies, they benefited a lot from the Chinese market, right? General Motors, Volkswagen, just as examples. So they've, over the years, they've made a lot of profit-
- QYQasar Younis
Sure.
- PLPeter Ludwig
... in, in China. And so, uh, just from, let's say, a firm's perspective, like you, you can see it just by trade, right? It makes sense that there's, there's some balance that, that can be achieved there. Um, I think in the long term though, absolutely these, these questions always arise. And you, you hit a point where the values become high enough that countries will demand that you manufacture there.
- QYQasar Younis
Mm-hmm.
- PLPeter Ludwig
And, and then once you start manufacturing within the country, oftentimes those cost deltas actually go away. Like whether, no, no matter what the brand is, if it's a local brand or an international brand, if it's manufactured in the same place, you usually end up with a product that's gonna be of s- similar cost.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah, when you talk about like if you look at an... So if you open your car, you can look at the content of the car in your doorframe. It, it says this is... The, the where's it made and how much was made, where. This is not a new thing. In the, in Michigan, in Detroit, this is a 50-year-old, 70-year-old debate. And 'cause there are real implications where if you just buy all the sub-components from foreign countries and you assemble them in Detroit, that doesn't mean it's made in Detroit. My slightly more caustic view or aggressive view on Europe is Europeans are a little bit of asleep at the wheel.
- PLPeter Ludwig
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
Um, in the, in the sense of I think if I could inject something into the brains of the, of the leadership of whether it's the EU commissioners or, or the, the indus- industrial, uh, families and leads is, it's like what I was told, "You gotta fight."
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And there's almost this like, "Oh, it's gonna be, you know, the, the Chinese are so cheap." The reality is it's not. Uh, there, there's a finite amount of dollars it requires to make something. And when these factories are so automated, that labor arbitrage, which historically was the reason-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... why China was really, uh, you know, cheaper, goes away. So a fully automated factory in Romania versus, you know, China, they're not as different as you think. Uh, I, I, you know, I fall into the category of view for, at least for America, being an American citizen, is we can't just be a consuming state.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
We have to build, because with that building, you also provide jobs and expertise.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Uh, and there are countless case studies of American companies that offshore our manufacturing. This is, you've heard the Detroit-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... annoyance here, right?
- 20:49 – 21:53
Can Robotics and Automation Re-Shore Vehicle Manufacturing?
- QYQasar Younis
the world.
- EGElad Gil
So if we think ahead and we say, "Okay, um, we went through a period where parts of our manufacturing and industrial base were effectively exported to other countries under labor arbitrage effectively or cheaper labor, a lot of know-how went out of the country and kinda stayed there. And in some cases, it almost feels like we've lost some of that know-how over time." Does robotics and autonomy and the automation of factories allow a moment in time where we can bring that back? A factory arbitrarily anywhere is cost-competitive based on automation versus labor. Is this a moment in time? And how should people act on that from a policy perspective? Or how should, how should we be thinking about that more broadly from the perspective of starting companies or innovation?
- QYQasar Younis
We don't know policy. We're not... we didn't go-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, sure.
- QYQasar Younis
... to, you know, Kennedy School or to engineering schools.
- EGElad Gil
(laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
So, uh, but I think broadly speaking, I think it is a huge opportunity. And you see companies like Re:Build-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
... and Anduril are taking advantage of this new-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... reality. So I think if I'm a founder, um, it's an extremely inspiring time because everybody is, uh, seeing this opportunity and willing to fund it.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
You know, these companies like Re:Build, Anduril are funded by classic venture capitalists. They're not funded by some PE shop that's doing a roll-up in New York.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, makes sense. And then I
- 21:53 – 26:41
Training Models for Autonomous Vehicles
- EGElad Gil
guess the other piece of it is you all spend... I mean, you're a very profitable company, which has always been very impressive given how much you've scaled the team and scaled your efforts. But also you spend a lot on models and on the development of different, um, AI-based tooling. Could you talk a little bit more about what sorts of models you've been training, how you think about the world there, where that's heading?
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah. So, so we do a lot of work in autonomy, right? So, uh, we talk a lot about our, our work in L4 trucking, um, and, uh, we have some really interesting things there right now, uh, largely in, in Japan. That itself is a, a huge, uh, a huge part of this. And there's an awful lot of data and, and model training that goes into that. We also do interesting work in autonomy in aerial and, and maritime as well.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
And so fighter jets and drones and boats and, um, in all of these things, there's a huge, uh, data problem. Um, like data is not nearly as easy to collect in some of those domains as it is, let's say, on the on-road domain.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
So we've had to do a lot of work over the years on how do we actually collect this data and make this useful and, uh, and, and put it into formats and, uh, such that you can actually get good performance out of the autonomy models that you train.
- EGElad Gil
Is there anything you can share in terms of some of the approaches you've taken there?
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah. So there, there's a few things I think that we, that we've done, uh, that have been super advantageous over the years. So we've been investing in synthetic data for quite a while, and the details of how that works has evolved and actually gone through several generations in our own tech stack. Um, right? Traditionally, you had a very computer graphics heavy approach. Now you have approaches that use things like Gaussian splash and, and diffusion models to, to, to do really interesting things with, uh, with synthetic data. And you can extend synthetic data i- into a bunch of other domains, including into, like, classified domains for, for defense, um, where you can actually get some, some really interesting advantages.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
Um, and then, um, I would say broadly in, in autonomy, uh, you always have this thing where if you have interesting data, as the machine learning techniques change and as, let's say, the, the new research papers come out, as long as you have that corpus of data, you can do really interesting things. And we- we've seen our own technology evolve in that direction as well, where we were actually able to use data that we collected even years ago, uh, to do things and get levels of performance that would have been previously, uh, impossible just using newer techniques applied to this data that we have. I think one technical strategy that's been quite advantageous for us is, I think we always wanted to wait in the win- I mean, explicitly we talked about this, wait in the wings until, like, the autonomy ecosystem converged on a handful of techniques and this kind of post-transformer boom. And then just seeing, like, you can ride in V13, uh, the Tesla FSD product, right? Or you can go to China, you can ride in these, and you're like, "This is it."
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
This, like, can't be... There was a... I mean, you and I are talking about three years ago, there was a huge debate on if, you know, end-to-end in the many ways an end is marketed, uh-
- EGElad Gil
(laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
... it's, it's, it's a marketing-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... you know, phrase as much as a, a technical phrase. Um, end-to-end camera-heavy systems, were they all, they're gonna... Are they gonna be able to perform? I think the big, big thing... So now, we're on the same page that autonomy is definitely gonna happen.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And when you're, you know, playing in the ecosystem, you also know kind of which way it's gonna happen.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And so now the question is, who's gonna monetize this?
- EGElad Gil
Mm. Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
And, uh, who's gonna take advantage of it? And, you know, the Waymo stuff is super impressive, but it is worth putting an asterisk that the business model hasn't been figured out yet. The Tesla business model has been figured out.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
And so people kind of interchange these, and, and they, and they often talk poorly about the Tesla system by saying, "Oh, it's dangerous, and it's not as good as a Waymo." Yeah, but the, like-... much more likely to continue to exist. And the big story of the many dozens of autonomy companies actually isn't, I mean, they know as much as us and we know as much as them. And simply because we recruit many dozens of people from, you know, I think we're probably Waymo's biggest employer outside of Waymo, and Cruise and T- Tesla, all- all of these- these organizations. So it's not like th- there's this false view that there's some secret in how to build self-driving tech. Actually, within the business, everybody knows how to build it.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And it's just, like, you know, in these podcasts where w- you're always gonna stay fairly high level and you're not gonna get into that, you know, m- into that depth, but-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
... generally, the ecosystem's converged on what those techniques will be. That was not the case just four years ago. A lot of debate. And then, as we saw, okay, there's a convergence, this is when you really, you know, move in.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, that makes sense. So y- you folks basically waited for that moment in time where the techniques and approaches crystallized and you're like, "Okay, now's our moment in time to really enter the market."
- QYQasar Younis
And stay alive until then.
- 26:41 – 32:03
Gauging the Bar for Autonomous Vehicles Safety
- EGElad Gil
that I find really interesting about, um, the adoption of generative AI is the bar is often higher for these AI systems than it is for people, in terms of how good the output has to be.
- QYQasar Younis
(laughs)
- EGElad Gil
And, um, it's kinda striking, right? Uh, so-
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah, if you ask somebody, like, "How should I do a Series A pitch?"
- EGElad Gil
Yeah. (laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
You'll take whatever they say 'cause it's just in their confidence, and then, like, you know, you do it in ChatGP and you're like, "No. Actually, this isn't right."
- EGElad Gil
(laughs) You look at self-driving-
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... and you look at the safety record, the claim from many of these companies is that you, uh, decrease death and injury dramatically by just adopting self-driving. And yet, from a regulatory perspective, there's all sorts of hurdles to adoption. What is the right bar for safety for autonomous systems for, you know, the, like, should it be at human level? Should it be dramatically better? Like, how much better?
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah, there's a colloquial and then there's, like, a regulatory answer. And on the colloquial answer, my view is, and that many people in the industry is, um, most of those systems are pretty good right now. Like, they're already, uh, certainly Waymo. If you just, like, you use, uh, proxy-
- EGElad Gil
It's like-
- QYQasar Younis
... metrics, like-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah. It's-
- QYQasar Younis
... mean time to disengagement.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
On a Waymo, that's tens of thousands of miles. That's-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... I think 30,000 miles.
- EGElad Gil
Well, it's also, like, uh, I guess, people measure the number of accidents, injuries-
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
... fatalities per mile, right?
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah. Exactly.
- EGElad Gil
And-
- QYQasar Younis
So, like, all of those, the Waymo's way better.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
Not even kind of close. And frankly speaking, the lot of these L2+ systems are a lot better. We're in a capitalist environment and there's liability involved, and so the question really fundamentally emerges is, who's liable for what? And so in the historic debate of, uh, roughly what you have is like, am I the driver who's responsible or is the vehicle responsible? And that can be actually boiled down to, is there somebody in the f- driver's seat?
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
When you're g- when, you know, the Waymo has taken that view and- and, uh, a Waymo engineer would always say, "Well, FSD's nothing like us. You can't have a Tesla with nobody in the driver's seat." Elon is trying to- trying to change that.
- EGElad Gil
Sure. But there's a liability piece of it, but separate from that, I mean, the media headline is always, "Waymo causes an accident," versus, "Waymo saved n lives."
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah. Exactly.
- 32:03 – 36:28
Timeline for Large-Scale Autonomous Vehicle Adoption
- EGElad Gil
do you think is the timeline to large-scale adoption of, uh, autonomy? So obviously, Waymo's growing really quickly right now. Um, Tesla is continuing to push forward on different autonomous systems. Like, how many years away do you think we are from-
- QYQasar Younis
General availability?
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, general- and frameworks changing from a regulatory or other perspec- So it's just kind of ...
- QYQasar Younis
Very, very nuanced, uh, question because it- it- it- it's different in different countries, so let's, let's kind of bound it to America for now, and then we can talk, talk the rest of the world. Um, every vehicle manufacturer in America that s- ships a, a real amount of cars is building some version of a Tesla competitor. Um, so I think general availability on a FSD-like system over the next five years is gonna be common, just like navigation systems.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Now, how good those systems are and what the price points are, those will all define the breadth of those features. Waymo will continue to expand cities. I think we're seeing Waymo in 2025 what they, what was promised in, like, 2018, 2019, which is-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... we're gonna do 40 city rollouts, and that's gonna be the next, you know, two or three years. W- the example, really, to think about this is let's say we're sitting in 20, 2007, the iPhone just launched, and you ask me, "How fast are we gonna see the iPhone in lots of people's hands?"
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
It's like slow, slow, slow, and then suddenly everybody has it.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
I think there's gonna be some version of that. One, you know, again, anecdotal example is if I go to LA and, uh, we'll c- You know, this is not Silicon Valley.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Everybody knows about self-driving. That was not the case, like, 12 months ago.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And why is that? 'Cause the Waymos are everywhere.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And so it's like for the first time when I explain applied intuition, people are like, "Oh, I get it." Before, they were just like, you know, there were all these, like, almost, like, Luddite kind of responses.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And it's every person who sits in a Waymo, they just, they convert over to, "Okay, self-driving is a thing." The natural next step is, "Okay, why doesn't my car have some version of this, or my passenger car?" So-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... I think, like, the whole, the, the whole window of expectations for self-driving was like 20, let's say, 15 to 2020.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And that's really, like, 2025 to 2030.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
But I think general availability is coming, coming quickly. I don't know. What's your-
- PLPeter Ludwig
I would just add, like, as an engineer, I think the next five years are probably the most exciting period-
- EGElad Gil
For sure.
- PLPeter Ludwig
... imaginable because-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- 36:28 – 38:47
Rethinking Urban Design for Autonomous Vehicles
- QYQasar Younis
where everything's designed, where hospitals are, how parking ... It's all based on cars. Cars are this ... Like, it's this invisible thing that it ... It's like electricity. This invisible thing-
- EGElad Gil
Uh-huh.
- QYQasar Younis
... that surrounds you is impacting every single thing.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Can you imagine going for a month and not interacting with a car?
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Or a week?
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, it's interesting because I remember, um, when all the first wave of self-driving stuff was happening, there'd be these, uh, dinners and conversations around self-driving adoption. At the time, people were really worried about truck drivers being displaced, and I remember meeting with different congresspeople to talk about that specific issue that they were worried about.
- QYQasar Younis
(laughs)
- EGElad Gil
And, um, to your point, I think people have kind of underthought the degree to which urban design is, in the modern world, designed around cars. It's where do you put the parking lot-
- QYQasar Younis
Everything.
- EGElad Gil
... um, you know-
- QYQasar Younis
Grocery stores, how far they are from neighborhoods, a- all of the ... How big can they be?
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
How small should they be? If you look at in New York and why New York is the way New York is, it's because actually the car is not the main thing of your life. It's actually the subway and walking. And it's, it's ... There's no other place like New York.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah, yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
You know what I mean?
- EGElad Gil
And eventually what you should end up with is lots somewhere outside of a city with a bunch of cars, and then when you need a car, you push a button, and it comes in, and it grabs you, and it takes you wherever you want, or ...
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
And you probably need fewer vehicles, I would say, per person as well.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah, I think, I think, well, the- that- that's where there's a debate. I think you see this with mobile phones is as calling became free ... Remember, calling used to be minutes-
- EGElad Gil
Sure.
- QYQasar Younis
... and texts used to cost 10 cents a pop.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Texts and calling haven't gone down.They've gone way through the roof-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... orders of magnitude higher than we ever communicated in 20 years ago. Only 20 years ago, not a long time ago. So there is a version that in 20 years from now, we have an order of magnitude higher. Imagine if everyone had a private jet.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
Do you think people are flying less around the world? More. They're flying a lot more. So I think there's a version that you have a lot more, uh, actual miles driven.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah. And the inside cabin of the car can change dramatically, right?
- 38:47 – 42:09
How Applied Intuition Uses AI for Tooling and OS
- EGElad Gil
kinda laid out your vision in terms of autonomy and sort of the reworking of cities and some really large scale things that are very exciting that are coming, and how you guys are gonna help power that, uh, for the industry. How do you think about using AI in other parts of your business?
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah. And, uh, specifically on tooling and, and, and, and the vehicle OS side, or let's say, in-cabin experience. Um, number one, the way software is being developed, we see this through all the, you know, um, the, the, uh, coding assisting tool, assistant tools. All of that needs to happen in automotive and these other industries, and so we're at the heart of that.
- EGElad Gil
There's a lot-
- QYQasar Younis
That's why we're changing our name to Windsurf Automotive.
- EGElad Gil
(laughs) Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. 'Cause on, on, on that, there is a, a lot of, uh, very interesting constraints to the problem when you talk about building software for vehicles.
- QYQasar Younis
Mm-hmm.
- EGElad Gil
And so I think w- we as a company were in a really interesting spot where we both have the AI technology and we also have the expertise, and all of these really interesting constraints on the software that's actually being developed.
- QYQasar Younis
Mm-hmm.
- EGElad Gil
Um, so I think you'll see some interesting stuff from us.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah. And then on, on the, on the vehicle OS side or the in-cabin s- side, you know, the vision there is a pretty straightforward, you know, which we're working on now, which is you take a, you know, a, a mining operator and he walks up to his Komatsu dirt mover, this giant machine that, you know, moves dirt basically 24/7. That machine should know who that person is. And as they enter, that person can have that, you know, conversation with the machine. 'Cause the machine sees it, it sees the world around it, it's multimodal, and it can sense it. What really happens on a mine in terms of safety is, a little bit of intelligence goes a long way. And so what you're starting to see is this emergence of this teaming, uh, and I think, like, that type of AI experience-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
... is, I think is more fundamentally important than even just getting, you know, Waymo going or just getting L2, because that's the hidden part of the economy. Whether it's writing software for the engineering tools that write software for safety-critical systems, or the stuff that happens beyond your eyes. And that's the stuff I think we're, we're super s- excited about without even going into defense. Defense is its own universe. Uh, the short version of what, you know, what we're seeing in, in defense is, this has been talked about by others, but, uh, we're certainly experiencing it, is defense is moving from, uh, one person, one machine to one person to many machines.
- EGElad Gil
Uh-huh.
- QYQasar Younis
The way to think about intelligence within these other domains and dominions isn't just, "Well, how can you use an LLM-"
- EGElad Gil
Sure.
- QYQasar Younis
"... you know, there?" It really is like, "Well, what does intelligence look like for a war fighter in the field who has a couple hundred drones?"
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
And how does he say, "Okay, I need this there and I need it fast, and I would get information from other, you know, other parts of the force and other forces and other countries to actually make that decision very, very quickly?"
- EGElad Gil
Yeah. And the problem space is all about autonomy for the individual system, it's about collaborative autonomy for the swarm, and then it's about the, the comms and the RF between all of these systems and, and how the data is actually moved between them. And so really, really interesting problems. And, uh, yeah, we've got some really interesting (overlapping)
- QYQasar Younis
So, like, you know, we think vehicle intelligence, trademark-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah. (laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
(laughs) ... is, is, is like this... Yeah. I, I, you know, it's funny, you know, as, as founder, the, for the founders who are listening, it's super rare to actually work on stuff that you, you know, you-
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... you really love. And it's no disrespect to people who work on, like, the dentist's CRM.
- EGElad Gil
Sure.
- QYQasar Younis
But it's, like, a lot more fun than dentist CRMs. (laughs)
- EGElad Gil
(laughs)
- QYQasar Younis
Because it's like taking AI in a way which is not just the chatbot-
- EGElad Gil
Sure.
- QYQasar Younis
... which is great for all the reasons it is, but it's, it's, like, beyond that.
- 42:09 – 43:31
Designing for User Experience
- EGElad Gil
you know, one of the things that I think is unique about Applied Intuition is you also have a very large and sort of deep bench on the design side.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
And you think deeply about these sort of forward-looking experiences, both in-cabin and more broadly. Could you talk a little bit more about both that team, but also that future that you're imagining that's coming?
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah. I think if you, you know, in the, in the ChatGPT world, there's some design there, obviously, and, and it's significant. But once you're truly, like, multimodal in a in-cabin consumer passenger vehicle, there's lots of screens. And just the way you interact, it's not just a button and a voice.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
And so there's still some, uh, some of that work is under wraps, but, um, you know, we, we're doing real work there.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
If people are particularly interested in that, especially from a designer's perspective and you're tired of doing, like, login screens for Google-
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
... like this (laughs) so this is like a good... Or, like, you know, spending six years on just changing the shade of the sign-in. Uh, so we're, we're really working on fundamental experiences. Like, HMI in the way that I think a lot of people at CMU when they're doing their, you know-
- EGElad Gil
So very deep experiences where y- you walk into the car, it somehow recognizes you, the seat moves into place for you versus somebody else who drives it sometimes. Like, everything auto-adjusts.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
Your playlist comes on, whatever it is, it kinda logs you in.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah. And just, like, how it interacts with you. Design isn't only pixels, it's an experience, right?
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Um, yeah. So I, I think design is, design is a huge area for us as well.
- EGElad Gil
And then, I guess
- 43:31 – 45:01
Applied Intuition’s Hiring Strategy
- EGElad Gil
from a, a team or hiring perspective, to your point on great things to work on, are there specific types of profiles you're looking for? Or just hiring across the board? Or how are you thinking about that right now?
- QYQasar Younis
Well, fortunately, we'll be hiring across the board. The, the, the, the, uh... Obviously, I think, I think we've, we hire from all of, let's say, the, the spectrum of, like, pure researchers all the way to folks who are working on the other end of just, like, infrastructure implementation.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
I think we have, like, over a hundred roles available. Yeah.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah. I mean, uh, of course, e- everyone, ourselves included, is, is always looking for great AI talent, uh, so that, that goes without saying. But, um, we also have, I would say, an extremely deep appreciation for just really strong software engineers that are also just deep in the, the operating systems and, and the, let's say, systems engineering realm. Um, uh, w- we work on stuff that's very important and very, very technical. And so, yeah, people who like hard problems like to work at Applied.
- QYQasar Younis
Yes. Our, uh, our company is, um... It's something we're proud of, it's like 82% software engineering.
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
It's j- it's extremely-
- EGElad Gil
Very concentrated. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
... it's a, it's a very, very technical company.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
Um, and we build products, you know?
- EGElad Gil
Mm-hmm.
- QYQasar Younis
We're not doing services and things like that.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
So that, that allows... You know, if you like that kind of stuff, you like building products, um, you know, we're, we're... I think, I think we're an interesting place. We, we might not be that cool though (laughs) .
- EGElad Gil
(laughs) I think, I think there's a... You got the jean jacket.
- QYQasar Younis
No, I got, I got the-
- EGElad Gil
You got the jean jacket. You got the Carhartt jacket.
- QYQasar Younis
... I got the, I got the Carhartt jacket.
- EGElad Gil
There you go. There you go.
- QYQasar Younis
That's about it. (laughs) Last time you'll see this.
- EGElad Gil
Oh, yeah.
- QYQasar Younis
(laughs) It's like a costume.
- EGElad Gil
Yeah. (laughs) It's just rolled up this time.
- QYQasar Younis
The best evidence it's a costume is I'm uncomfortable in it. (laughs)
- EGElad Gil
It's like, I'm wearing, like, a clown outfit.
- QYQasar Younis
(laughs)
- EGElad Gil
You look good. You look good. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
- QYQasar Younis
Yeah. Thanks for having us.
- 45:01 – 45:21
Conclusion
- QYQasar Younis
- SGSarah Guo
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Episode duration: 45:21
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