The Breakthrough For Home Robots with Kyle Vogt, CEO of the Bot Company | Ep. 32

Do you think it's like cooking a steak at some point?

Yeah, why not? If you think about, at the end of the day, you've, you have pick-

Mm

-and-place and simple manipulation, that's what cooking is. They're just like a much higher degree of reliability, and there's other things around food safety and bacteria, and other things that come in cookie, uh, cooking and temperature sensing and what like that. So it's all doable. It's just like, are we not there-

Do you think at some point it's like, "Hey, robot, I'm at work right now. There's a steak in the fridge. Please cook it and clean up everything," by the time of, like, fifteen years from now, that's, that's doable?

Less than five.

Less than five?

Yeah.

[upbeat music] All right, I'm really pumped to be here with Kyle Vogt. Kyle, thanks a ton for making time for this.

Thanks for having me.

So I wanna start with talking about, like, why robotics seems to be having such a moment. You know, it's obviously been really important for a long time, but in the last few years, it seems like a lot of really good entrepreneurs, a lot of good investors, have started to pour a bunch of time, money, resources, and effort into this. And I guess I'm curious just to start with sort of laying a foundation of, like, can you put this in some context, and, like, what used to be the case and what has changed that's, like, making people so energized right now?

Yeah, it is. It's, like, the most excited I've ever seen people in robotics. And, you know, I, I guess as an engineer, there's something, like, romantic about building machines to do the stuff that we don't wanna do, and that's, that's why I've been doing this for so long. First with, you know, a decade on self-driving cars, but for me, even going back to, like, teenage years doing BattleBots and then going to MIT to basically build more robots. But, you know, during that entire spectrum, it's also-- it's always been this niche thing, and frankly, like, robots have never really lived up to their promise. There's always something... They're always overly fragile. Like, in a factory environment, we put them in cages-

Yeah

... and if things don't line up, like within a millimeter, the whole thing doesn't work.

Except the BattleBots. Those were good, actually.

[chuckles]

Now that I'm thinking back-

BattleBots were, yeah-

You made them with, like, the saws and everything?

Uh, ours had, like, a hydraulic axe, which was, which was pretty cool. But the-- calling these robots is a bit of a stretch. They're basically glorified RC cars.

Yeah.

Right? Um-

That's right, with a weapon.

Yeah, so, so [chuckles] with a weapon. What's different now is, you know, for the first time, you have robots that are powered by... Essentially, they have all the brains of an LLM built into this robot, and we're controlling them with neural networks instead of classically engineered algorithms. And so the difference was, before, if you have a robot that's, like, in a room like this, uh, even saying, like, "Go to the whiteboard," is almost, like, an impossibly hard computer science problem. It's like, okay, I have to build an exact three-D map of the world, like, have a detector that can figure out what a whiteboard is, train it on millions of examples of what whiteboards look like, just to be able to do this, and even then, the failure rate would be high if you put it in a different room and it doesn't have a map. But now it's almost like cheating. You can take all the-