Leonardo Giusti: Archetype AI's co-founder on physical AI and the limits of the chatbot

0:00Leonardo Giusti:Design can play a critical role in transforming R &D technology into products. R &D often is driven by the curiosity, and it's a beautiful thing. Sometimes we forget this, but these scientists, these engineers, are driven by their own passion, their own curiosity. As a designer, our role is to understand it and try to materialize it into something tangible and concrete. Leonardo Giusti has spent his career in the spaces between disciplines, between art and science, between research and product, between the physical world and the digital one. It's not a conventional design path, but it's one that's led him to work that most designers never get near.

0:45He's the co-founder and chief design officer of Archetype AI, a company building foundation models trained not on text or images, but on the continuous stream of sensor data flowing from the real world like factories, power grids, and city intersections. Before that, he spent nearly seven years at Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group, where he led design on Project Soli, a miniature radar chip that taught devices to understand human gesture and presence, and Project Jacquard, which wove interactivity into everyday objects like Levi's jackets and Yves Saint Laurent bags. He holds a PhD in human-computer interaction from the University of Florence and spent years as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT's design lab.

1:32He's also filed more than 30 patents. What makes Leonardo's thinking distinctive is his insistence that the metaphors we use to describe AI shape everything. How we build it, how we regulate it, and who it ends up serving. He's skeptical of the dominant vision of AI as an autonomous agent that does things for us and is pushing towards something different, AI as a tool we think with. In this conversation, we get into his unusual path to design through cognitive science and robotics, what it actually means to treat emerging technology as a design material, why the chatbot is a primitive interface for the physical world, and why he believes augmenting human intelligence might be the most important design challenge of our time.

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3:49And now, back to the show.

4:19about that sort of transition you made from working on Google on some really interesting, cool products to starting your own thing here with Archetype.

4:27Leonardo Giusti:As you said, I'm now one of the co-founder of Archetype AI, which is a physical AI startup where we are building this AI foundation model that is designed from the ground up to live in the physical world, helping people run machines, factories, infrastructure, cities, et cetera. So it's really like a deep tech startup where it has this very strong R &D component. And so as a designer, I always found myself working very close with R &D. I'm always being more comfortable, you know, to work with engineers and scientists, a bit outside to what you may consider to be the mainstream of the design community.

5:07Leonardo Giusti:I believe this is a little bit the result of my upbringings as a designer. I didn't really take a straight path, but many different detours that ultimately brought me where I am today. So I have a very mixed background as a designer. As you can probably say from my accent, I'm Italian. I studied there. And when I was in college, I was starting to be very interested in cognitive science and artificial intelligence and human-machine interaction. And I stumbled upon design later in my career. I was doing my PhD at the time. I was working on robotics, trying to design them in a way that they can interact socially with people.

5:48Leonardo Giusti:And we did this project with Domus Academy. It's a design institution in Italy that captured the outcomes of the radical design movements in Italy in the 60s and the 70s. It's a design school. It's a design institution. They also do research. We started working together. And I was exposed to this idea of design. Design, though, as a critical practice. It was this idea that design can be seen as an inquiry method, a way to question the status quo. And so this really clicked with me, this idea that design is not just about solving problems, but really it's about discovering the problems that are worth solving, you know, to outline new narratives and vision for the future.

6:27Leonardo Giusti:In this context, I learned to see prototypes, for example, not just a way to approximate the final product, more like provocations to think critically about what you're building, about the implication in society and so on. All these things clicked for me and I found my passion and I took all this bag of experience and I moved to US in 2011 when I was a researcher at the MIT Design Lab in Boston. I spent a couple of years and then worked a little bit at Samsung and finally I landed at Google ATAP. Google ATAP is Advanced Technology and Projects. So I was actually working in an R &D lab that really helped me refine my design practice as a designer in this highly technical environment.

7:11Leonardo Giusti:When I was there, we were working on some very interesting projects. One of them was Project Soli, which was this tiny radar that we were able to embed inside consumer electronics. and he was able to understand what was happening around them. When we started, really, we didn't really know about what do we do with this. You know, it really started from the curiosity of some scientists and some researchers. And a designer, when you are there, it's kind of interesting because you can't really think already about the products or product features or why it's useful. But really, the first thing that you need to do if you want to sit at the table with these people is to work with them and try to understand why they are curious about these things and what are the properties of these new materials, basically, that you're working on.

7:57Leonardo Giusti:The core idea of Solu was that this tiny radar was embedded in consumer electronics that now become aware of their surroundings and aware of people's behavior. And this radar was able to understand different aspects of non-verbal communication. For example, it was able to understand when you were moving toward a device or away from a device. They were able to understand different types of gestures so that you can start to establish a more seamless interaction with these devices. What brought me to Archetype, the team that was building Soli, we realized very quickly that in order to make it work, to understand all these different behaviors, you have to use very advanced machine learning.

8:37Leonardo Giusti:And machine learning was very expensive at the time. In order to recognize, for example, even one single gesture that you do on top of a Nest device or a pixel phone devices, it requires a huge amount of data collection. For example, we spend like years to collect data of a simple swipe gesture and we collect 5 million samples of this gesture all around the world to take into consideration different cultural differences, demographic differences, and so on. And it was very expensive. Every time you want to do a new gesture or a new behavior, you have to redo this training once again. And so very quickly we realized that this really doesn't scale much and it's probably one of the key problems that IoT had in the past.

9:16Leonardo Giusti:In parallel, there were all these interesting new things happening in AI, these foundation models. And so we thought, what if we actually build a foundation model for sensor? So every time we want to create a new use cases, we don't have to retrain it from scratch, but we can actually just fine-tune it with a smaller set of data. And this is a little bit how Archetype started, with this idea to build a foundation model for sensor data so that we can develop a very quickly new use case. It's a sort of like horizontal platform for the physical world based on the continuous understanding of sensor data.

9:53Leonardo Giusti:So we are able to translate the sensor data into meaningful information. On the project Soli, I'm curious, did you bring any of your cultural background to this project? I'm just thinking that Italians like to speak a lot with their hands, which I love. So there's naturally, I'm sure, maybe an interest in like, what can we do with sort of a gestural communication, but perhaps it doesn't translate across different cultures. Yeah, just curious what part of your perspectives you brought to that. Definitely. When you look at the way we interact with each other as humans, it's very intuitive, right?

10:24Leonardo Giusti:If I see you walk behind me, I can probably keep a door open for you, even without saying a single word. I immediately understand that you want to come through the door and so I keep open to you. If I see that you are touching your glass and maybe pour water for you, There is the intuitive understanding that we have between people that is based on this understanding of subtle cues, this little nonverbal communication cue. But this sort of understanding doesn't really exist with technology. Technology is, if you want, very rude. It interrupts us at the wrong time. It doesn't have the ability to understand any of these social cues that make our interaction with other people very smooth, easy, and go.

11:03Leonardo Giusti:And so really the idea there was, can we bring some of this social intelligence into consumer electronics? Can we design this device in a way that can participate in our everyday life in a more polite way, if you want? It's not that we need to make them smarter, but maybe they can be a little bit more polite and participate in a more harmonious way in our day-to-day life. And so we took inspiration from the way people interact socially to build a design language, an interaction design language for consumer electronics. And this was, in a nutshell, what Project Soli was in the end. So Project Soli, it's shipped in Pixel 4 and also in the Nest Hub.

11:44So it went from being this abstract idea to something that was like a commercial feature in existing Google products. You also worked on Project Jacquard as well, which was building interactive textiles that were deployed commercially with Levi's jackets and Yves Saint Laurent bags as well. What did you learn from that project, Project Jacquard? I mean, it feels like it is related to Soli, but different in many ways.

12:15Leonardo Giusti:Project Jakarta, as you said, was this conductive fabric that we could embed into different products. The core idea was to bring interaction capabilities to everyday objects. There was this idea that we can bring computational capability into everyday objects, but often it results in the design of new things that after six months end up into a drawer and no one uses them anymore. We have seen in the past this explosion of Internet of Things, right? That they've tried to do all sorts of things that are cool for a little bit, but then disappear. What we really tried to do with Jakar was to really try to understand how to augment the things we already use, like a jacket, a backpack, a pair of shoes, for example, a project we did with Adidas.

13:04Leonardo Giusti:It wasn't to create something new, but to really try to leverage what we already use and exist and make them better. And in order to do that, we have to really study how things were made. So we worked with this company to understand their manufacturing process, for example, to be sure that the technology we were building could be part of the way they do things. So they didn't have to change, for example, how you make shoes or how you build a jacket. So this was, to me, a very important understanding. Coming from Jacquard, when we want to bring technology and intelligence and connectivity to the physical world, we should start from what we already have and try to make it better.

13:43Leonardo Giusti:In order to do that, we need to deeply understand, as designers, how things are made. Because if we create friction to the manufacturing process, it will never happen, right? I mean, the costs start to raise and so on. So a few of your projects have made it from this R &D phase into actual commercial applications, and that's not often true for R &D projects. And we talked to the Google X folks a few months ago, and they're sort of in this similar arena of developing very speculative in some ways products and experiences, and some number of them make it on. What are your insights about bringing something from a more experimental phase into something that's more commercial?

14:22I believe that design can play a critical role in transforming R &D technology into products.

14:33Leonardo Giusti:I do believe that design is sort of like this cog that sits in between R &D and productization. And very often, one of the mistakes that I have done, I've seen other people doing, is going to work with the people that do R &D with a product design mindset. And I'm trying to explain why. If you go there and you start immediately talking about product features and users, you create constraints to the R &D process that at that time are not really necessary. R &D often is driven by the curiosity. And it's a beautiful thing. Sometimes we forget this. But these scientists, these engineers are driven by their own passion, their own curiosity.

15:20Leonardo Giusti:As a designer, our role is to understand it and try to materialize it into something tangible and concrete. And of course, this is to me is always the first step. When I start a new R &D process, I try to work with these people, try to run what I call material study. I try to understand any type of technology as a new material. And I try to study it first, try to understand what are the characteristics of this new material. For example, we saw it was radar. It works on the electromagnetic spectrum. but you really didn't understand from an interaction point of view what can actually do. So the first study we did was to understand, okay, how does it react to the human body?

15:58Leonardo Giusti:Can you understand large movements like I'm here, I'm not here? But surprisingly, as we were running this study, we discovered that it can also detect tiny, tiny movement of your fingers. And so in this first phase, really, as a designer, we need to be very humble and we need to work with these people, try to work with them to take what they're building and try to materialize into prototypes, experiments that allow you to understand the affordances and the properties of this new technology, because then these can give you the ideas. When we realize that Soli can understand large body movement and tiny movement, then we're, oh, interesting.

16:36Leonardo Giusti:We can now understand different aspects of nonverbal communication like we do as human, like presence, large body movement, gestures. And then from there, we build a coherent interaction design language. And of course, this is the first phase, and this allows us to have a very material understanding of this technology, of the properties that they have, which is quite common in other disciplines outside interaction design, like in architecture, the importance of material, for example, right? It's critical for the development then of the final output. This is the first step, and then you need to understand how to translate that.

17:09Leonardo Giusti:What you do by doing this, basically. You build almost a map, a legible map of the technology so that someone with a more product mindset can look at this map and understand what journey they want to take into the product development. And so I think at the very early stage, the role of design is to build these legible maps of the technology to inform further on the development of new products. The only example that I've seen, I mean, there are a lot of people, the Bauhaus was big and they had like these basic courses, like when they were teaching the student how to explore the properties of materials, for example.

17:46Leonardo Giusti:I think another interesting reference is what they were doing at Pixar. And there is this famous quote, like technology inspires art, arts challenge technology. And I see at the very early stages, a very similar approach where technology really inspired design, but design has the opportunity to push the technology from the very beginning if you're willing to sit at the same table with these people so that you can accelerate and try to find a path over time that makes sense from a product point of view. History is filled with examples of consumer products that came from some sort of R &D scenario, but they just showed up at the wrong time.

18:28There's the Apple Newton, which was a brilliant device. Google Glass, the Segway. All of these things now are in our lives and like normal and not that magical, though they were at the time when they were introduced, but they just weren't timed very well. In that R &D to productization cycle, how do you know when something is ready for consumers or vice versa when consumers are ready for that device?

18:56Leonardo Giusti:So the way I see the innovation cycle, right? Very often we talk from zero to one, which is like from an innovation to a product. And as a designer, we have a lot of techniques, design thinking and so on to really work this through, right? We take some existing technology, we shuffle them, we play with them, we understand how they fit into society, use cases, and we build beautiful product. But there is another phase that it's often not considered, especially as a designer. It is the phase that goes from the invention to the innovation. And the invention of a new technology like radar or AI, for example, as well.

19:33Leonardo Giusti:This phase from minus one to one is where we translate some early stage ideas into a technology. It is an innovation itself. And then later on, we translate it into a product. I think there are different ways. And I've talked a little bit about how you can translate early stage invention into possible innovation, like a new technology with coherent, for example, interaction model for Soli and so on. that innovation isn't going to become a product. That's, I think, when it gets quite hard and it really depends on timing. Is society ready for that? Is the economic context and cultural context able to receive that technology?

20:16Leonardo Giusti:And the reality is a lot of people run studies and you can try to predict and figure it out, but it's typically really hard, especially with Project Jacquard. We weren't really sure about the viability of Jacquard as a product that actually fit into people's everyday life. We have a vision, we have an idea. But what we were able to do was to start really, really small. And so not every company can afford this, of course. But the idea that you have a branch of your company that is dedicated to create these products, which you build in small batches, and you actually test them before you go a full scale.

20:55Leonardo Giusti:The idea that you can try different version of a product, it's typical in software. It doesn't really happen in hardware very often because of obvious reasons. But I think it's what we're trying to do with Jakarta. We're seeding products into the market to understand and study how people react if it works and if it doesn't. So understanding the right timing for a technology and if there is the right social cultural content. I believe it's really hard to do on paper, and I think there are ways in which we can, these days especially, try to test it, even if it is an hardware product, the same way we do with software.

21:34Let's shift and talk a bit about what you're doing now with Archetype. And a lot of our audience is familiar with large language models and the way they're trained on, let's say, all the text that exists on the internet or all the imagery. and what you're doing is slightly different. You're building models that are based from data from the physical world via sensors and other technology. Maybe you could give us a specific example of the way that your technology works in a project that you're working on.

22:01Leonardo Giusti:Our foundation model is designed from the ground up to continuously analyze sensor data and translate them into an interpretation that is useful for certain tasks. The model is able to receive as input data such as accelerometer, cameras, any type of time series data, and is able to translate them into a description and is able to understand hidden patterns in the data like anomalies and so on. The core idea of the model is that we are able to map this sensor data into the same mathematical space that language. And so by aligning them together, we can both control the model using natural language and actually have a description of what's happening in the world in a language that we humans understand.

22:48Leonardo Giusti:Sometimes we refer it to like a rosetta stone that is able to map different types of input to language and make them intelligible. We are working with many different customers, mainly in the area of industrial technology. We have several partnerships with manufacturing companies, for example, where they have a lot of data. There was a time 15 years ago where factories have embedded a lot of sensors into machines, and they are sitting now there with a huge amount of data, and they don't know what to do with that. And now finally, we have AI that can actually able to understand this data. And so you have an entire factory that have been already sensorized that we can actually provide additional value there.

23:32Leonardo Giusti:And in use cases, like for example, one of the most typical ones is predictive maintenance. We know, for example, when a machine is about to break, we can spot, for example, signal in the machines before it happens that it's going to break. And that's very important because these machines sometimes are very expensive and even a few hours of downtime is worth a lot of money. We are able to identify anomalies, for example, in certain data in a certain machine that may prompt an operator in the field to go there and check what's going on, if there is something is broken or not. Other use cases that we have outside the manufacturing and industrial setting is, for example, we are working with different cities as well.