AI Entrepreneurs Q&A: How Every Industry Is About to Be Transformed by Humanoids w/ Vinod Khosla & Brett Adcock | EP #160

0:00You're gonna see robots first in the workforce in like vast numbers. You're gonna see them in the home and you're starting to see them in space. This will all happen. Brit at cock. Space would be fantastic for humanoids. It's just like such a pernicious place for humans. And the node cause life. Let me give you my most optimistic view of a constellation. The future of work, surgery and space travel. You see robot surgeons in the future being the baseline. I think the beauty in a humanoid is that we really want to be eternal purpose. Customization generally means more cost. What is the role of universal basic income in the economy of the future?

0:38I do think we will have to deal with that issue through policy. I don't think the current capitalist system unmodified will work. Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

0:59This is your time. Your time. We'll take questions at the mic. We'll take questions on Slido. Let's begin right here. Sun, Mike Wondler, I've got a company called Evercore Energy that I just started to innovate energy. And I was really focused on microreactors for heavy industrial and mining. So the fusion really changes that. I hadn't heard that that was going to be available in the next five years. What companies should I watch and maybe pivot my business model? Look, there's a lot of fusion companies, but there's good half -dozen efforts that are high credibility. So that's why I'm pretty confident.

1:45Commonwealth, Hylion. There's others. There's Type 1, there's Realter. there's just, in fact, every country has their own effort, just like every, there's sovereign AI, there's sovereign fusion technology coming out. So my thing I'll only comment out make is in all these areas, the massive change, you have to look at regulatory forces and political pressures. Right. Right. the screen actors guild fought the use of AI and their customers will almost certainly go out of business if they comply with that agreement. That's what will happen. So regulatory matters and in vision specifically, I think no matter how safe you are and we are investors in care power with Bill Gates, what will happen is it will take longer to cite a power plant.

2:51Right. Because of community objections, environmentalist objections, nimbiism, all that, then it takes to develop a fusion technology from scratch. So that's the situation. That's why I become a little less bullish on vision reactors, I would love to see it, but I don't see it happening rapidly while I see an easy path to building 5 ,000 fusion power plants by 2050. Maybe more. Amazing. It's good, John. Hi, my name's John. This is for Brett. How soon do you think that there will be the opportunity to have robots in the field for the traits. So I'm in an auto repair business, I want to send a technician out.

3:39And secondly, will there be the opportunity to beta and partner with expertise that we have in that with the company like yours? Yeah, we made the decision pretty early on to pick like the minimal amount of companies to ship like a certain number, which is for us as like magic numbers 100 ,000 robust into. We have that now with our first two groups. So we have like relatively young, we're still have the truth is we just don't have the bandwidth. A lot of times to do a lot of extra work outside the one what we have. But we're doing a lot of work right now in other areas, like health care, construction, other, and obviously the home.

4:20So I think for us, to extend, there's a mechanical need for mechanical human in. To be putting those, we want to be understanding and looking at it more. So yeah, hopefully it seems like a really exciting. I hope it's an area we can spend time and next few years. But it's too, I would love it. Yeah, amazing. Steve. Hi, it's Steve Strickland. First of all, to both of you, thank you for the wealth you've created for many in this room and certainly around the planet. But for Brett, a question. When you start reaching smaller businesses where you're placing humanoids, will you allow customization of the chassis to meet the need of the particular user.

5:04I think the beauty in a humanoid is that we really want to be general purpose. And when we start customizing, we start making things really specialized, it's really when you get caught in this problem of high -energy scenarios, really hard to keep it reliable, to maintain it, to design it, then we have multiple different product paths. And then the AI system is not doing well with transfer learning across those different task now since the embodiment's different, the observation space, the robot's different, it becomes like really challenging. I think our vision for this is we have one single hardware platform that can do everything a human can.

5:39We move our roadmap to be more like a human. We move like a human. We can touch and feel things more like a human over time. So our roadmap's kind of drawing us down that curve. And we won't do every single thing in the world, but we want to be able to do a majority of what humans can do with one hardware system. That's how we're going to get the cost down to like 20 ,000 dollar levels. And that's how we're going to intelligence up to allow it to do that end to end. So I think in the foreseeable future we do not plan to make any hardware adjustments to the main chassis. But we do plan to make product revisions to be able to operate more and more like a human over time.

6:12Okay, thanks. Yep. The note on slide over here, the question is if electrical generation is taken care of, will there still require additional investments in transmission line, distribution, transformers, I'm thinking about need for, you know, reasonably close to room temperature superconductors and such. So we will need transmission lines, but let me suggest the following. There will be different size fusion reactors. So we have conval fusion, which is building a 500 megawatt reactor. Yeah. We have a realtor fusion that's building 50 megawatt reactors. Now, you can put 50 megawatt reactors in what is today a substation.

6:59What does it do eliminate the need for transmission? So we will need more transmission. I'm not saying we won't, but my bet is citing more reactors in more locations. We'll be an alternative we have.

7:18So I am pretty optimistic that will happen. I want to just add a comment on RedSancer on the last question. Customization generally means more cost. And small business, Henry Ford said you can have any color as long as it's black. The point was reduce number of skews, reduce the cost, increase the volume and that's the way to make them really affordable. Now they will be specialized robots that will do other things and have more capability, especially when you go beyond human capability. So when you go to superhuman capability being able to lift a car without a jack, you may need more specialized operations.

8:09So I I think it looked very much like the auto industry. It will diversify some, but the highest volume things will be the cheapest and most applicable. And the world is designed around human form factors. So they'll fit in many more places without needing to change the environment. And people will change some environments. Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. Did you know that we're likely to see as many as 10 billion humanoid robots by 2040. And that Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure Anticipates, they'll have robots in our home in the next two to three years. How about Max Hodak's new form of BCI called Biohybrid Interfaces that could offer millions of connections between your neocortex and the cloud?

9:00Then there's Michael Andreg, whose efforts at Ion is focusing on uploading the human connectome to the cloud by 2030. These aren't science fiction scenarios. They're serious efforts underway today. I've distilled the most powerful insights and roadmaps from this year's Abundance 2025 Summit into a comprehensive report that will transform how you see the future. Get your free copy of the Abundance 2025 Summit Summary at dmandis .com slash breakthroughs. That's dmandis .com slash breakthroughs. It's good, Mike. Mark, Mark? Hey, Peter. My name is Mark Donovan, founder of the Denver Basic Income Project, and my moonshot is to create affordable living as a service.

9:43Housing food energy data and transportation for $250 a month by the end of the decade. But note, you started by asking how will we pay people in the future, and I haven't heard anyone answer that yet. Yesterday, Kathy Wood said that technology will create more jobs than it displaces, which has been true historically. But I've been assuming this will not be true with AI and humanoid robots. What do you think about that and what is the role of universal basic income in the economy of the future? So For a longer Distration on that I wrote a 25 page piece on AI Will it lead to dystopia or utopia? So it's a website you can Google it which wanted to choose Clearly utopia.

10:26Okay, just checking. I do think there's dystopic elements But those will be societal choices. We can go down certain paths and not go down others, but there's a 25 page explanation of that. What I would say is, I'm sorry, I've got your original question. What do you do? UBI, is it coming? Is it going to be a good one? Job displacement? Is it going to be a good one? Yeah. It's our more jobs going to be a good one. It's a place in what's the role of UBI. So I address that question extensively in that paper. And then what happens? So what happens next five years? What happens in the 2030s? And what happens in the 2040s?

11:11So I cover all this in this paper. Job displacement will happen. In 2016, I wrote a paper on this, I think it was in Forbes or Fortune, I forget. It was long 5 ,000 word treaties on that. I do a lot of writing. And my view was, AI will lead to great abundance, great productivity growth, great GDP growth, everything economists love and increasing income disparity. That was about eight or ten years ago. I wrote that piece and I do think we will have to deal with that issue through policy and that's why I think societies will make different choices in different countries. It'll be a country by country choice of what we allow, how do we plan to share the abundance more broadly?

12:13I don't think the current capitalist system un -radified will work in that environment. Interesting. So I always say I'm a techno optimist like other people, but with care and caring. Care being on safety, which is also going to be an issue and caring for those left behind. Thank you Benoit. Thank you. Niba. How do you pronounce your name properly? Nabiha. Nabiha. Thank you. I know for portfolio companies. Yes. It's great to see you, Benoit. Thank you for supporting my journey. It's been awesome. Would love to get both of your thoughts on how space exploration and colonization is going to evolve with humanoid robots.

12:56I'm getting pretty excited about it. I always want to be an astronaut that hasn't happened. but how do you think the space is going to move in the next three to five years? Very cool. Oh, yeah, thanks. Yeah, we wrote about this when we started the company, sorry, I wrote about it. Space would be fantastic for humanoids. It's just such a pernicious place for humans. I think about colonization, exploring the stars. It'd be great to send mechanical and body agents out to the world and out to the outer space and have them really help us there. And I think you start thinking about really exciting future where we're living off planet and how that would work.

13:32So I really hope even in the near term we're hoping to deploy robots there. There's been robots developed with NASA that are up in ISS and have been up and forth. So it's a pretty good precedent here. I think it's like a little bit. All of this for me comes on like where is it on the adoption curve? You're going to see robots first in the workforce and vast numbers. You're going to see them in the home and your start seeing them in space. And they're kind of like almost like not that's quite sequentially, but like you're gonna happen to see in certain places first In higher quantities and over time this will all happen like like we'll have robots Colonizing planets will have special purpose robots maybe helping out those fully autonomously on Mars and the moon so It's gonna be extremely exciting as soon as it's in time.

14:14We got to like we got to work on this on the ground here on earth first But we would love to play a part in that. Yeah, so So I would agree with one caveat. People think we have to go to the moon or space or mine asteroids to get resources. That I don't think will be the reason we do it. It'll be because we love to explore. And I think that'll be the reason to go to space. I don't think Sam would mind me telling this story. I was just talking to Sam and he asked me a question I hadn't thought about. When will the first self -replicating AI probe lead planet Earth? And I said 15 years and his answer to me was, you're way too conservative.

15:06Not something people call me very often. So it's fun fact. Amazing. All right. Let's go to Orlando on zoom or land if you're there. What's your question? Hello, it's for bread So I mean they I mean the agricultural business. So when should we expect The humanites in agriculture like working in the farms on their rain and sun Was that working yeah, but so when do you expect to see humanoid robots working in the fields in farming given, you know, all weather conditions. Totally. I actually grew up on a farm, like third generation corn and soybeans, agriculture farm in Illinois. So it's kind of close to my heart.

15:53So I think it's same, maybe like similar type of like through line as the last response. Like robots will start indoors. It's better for like IP, like it's easier for like because of weather reasons, other things. And we'll start seeing robots from there, go outside, do there's tons of decent work outside, we would love to do. I would say it gets harder there than probably indoors. All this is happening in the next like 10 years, like we're seeing robots inside, workforce, outdoors, we're seeing robots in the home. Hopefully we're seeing like some replicating robots out in the space, that'd be really cool to have that's incredible.

16:33credible. So yeah, so I think like for us, we're like focused right now on trying to get to a 100 ,000 unit ship. That's kind of like where our near -term goals like that. We need like a certain amount of like momentum here from the business to get it, start getting costs down data, pipeline builds, and robots down the world we're working fully autonomously with no human interventions. That for us will be indoors. The next chapter in our book will be the home outdoors. I think I think in the next five years, we will demonstrate robots can work in the farms. The capability will be there, but there's a big difference as we are talking, this generally applies to all the technologies we are talking about.

17:19When we demonstrate the capability, when it has 1 % penetration, is when I consider the job done, but there's a societal change matrix that can take a long time for full adoption. But so keep that in mind with respect to all these technologies, including farm robots. It was about 13 years ago I had my two kids, my two boys, and I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids, and really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, It was like the most exciting time ever to be alive.

18:04And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a found upload. Founding is one of the most advanced diagnostics in therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at. to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular and cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So found is one of my keys.

18:43I make it available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because you know, I help this in you wealth. But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another hundred trillion bacterial cells, fungi, a viral. And we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company in a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics, who's actually developed in New Mexico, at the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed, as a biodefense weapon. and their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins, and as a consequence of that, what foods are your super foods that are best feed to eat?

19:36Or what food should you avoid, right? What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements, and Viom really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror saying, I feel great about life is so important. And so a product I use every day twice a day is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide, it's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your looking appearance.

20:26So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. Amica. Thank you. This is highly inspiring. This is phenomenal. My moonshot is to advance the adoption of sustainable habitat for human beings all over the planet. I have two questions, one for each of you. In terms of robotics, do you currently or are you planning to have some kind of policy on military applications? Where does that go? Because once you have humanoids, I mean, great question.

21:11What's the second question? And the second question in terms of fusion and power grids and stuff like that if my moon chute is sustainable habitat for humanity. Is there any thought given to what might happen if we have a solar flare or some kind of serious event that could wipe out grids as we have them today through massive EMP or whatever? How do we protect our future power grids from that? I'll ask for short answers. I want to try and get a few more questions in. So I know you have a very clear answer on. Yeah, we won't do anything military related at all. It's in our company mandate. I wrote a line in 2022.

21:47I think it severely hurt the civilian commercial market that we're in. We always have a little terminator vibe going on with humanoid. So you really want to say clear that in our mind, in the markets much bigger than the non -military side. But I'd be known fragile grid.

22:07Yeah. I've sort of already answered that between super -hot geothermal, which applies to most to the Western United States. And fusion, large reactors, small reactors, I think will be in good shape. We still have to build more transmission, but my bed is with energy becoming cheaper you'll be drilling a tunnel center the ground yeah protect yourself again set fantastic all right we go to coal on zoom and then we'll go to Z next after that coal yeah but again under the purpose under the purpose guys I guess the most common things that humans do are drive vehicles so it's a big ask to ask all agriculture and businesses to go to self -driving vehicles does So let's figure plan to have these humanoids be able to drive a vehicle and do all those things that go along with it.

23:03Yeah. One of my dreams is like have my robots fly in archery aircraft. Like that'd be when you pilot, right? It's pilot shortage. I think like one thing that Vanot did a good job on is there's this like there's like the ability for the robots to do it and demonstrate and there's ability to do, like, actually integrate this into society at scale and where the focus lies. Which is, like, those could be on different timescales, so we can definitely show like a farming robot. Perhaps give it a robot to have a card on a street or something like that. And then what we actually plan to do in terms of, like, where production's heading, where the clients are at, where we're shipping into.

23:42All right, listen, on a long enough time frame, I think these, who are going to do everything in humankind? Physical. Great. Like, I think, this thing. Yeah, hey, Brett, your talk has been really inspiring and I was really excited about the future of humanoid robots And then I thought something really saw about something quite disturbing which I wanted to ask your thoughts on So you see in the future humanoid robots are obviously going to be connected to the grid right so what's stopping a malicious hacker You know, you could hacking the system and instead of making the robot do dishes It would it could in theory make the robot grab a knife and stab that you know their host to death during their sleep.

24:20So that was quite disturbing. And I would love to experiment with. No, no, I love to hear your thoughts on how you prevent that, sorry. Yeah, no, it's great. It's like just just watch a black near episode and came right here. What happens here? I listen, I think one is we treat cybersecurity, local security in the robot. It's extremely important as we have a whole team around it. It's not like one solve here to say, oh, we're going to do this and leave everything on like, you know, non -bile tile memory on firmware and it will be fine. But we also do that. That will help. I think in general, a robot doesn't need to be connected to a network.

24:58So the Helix video you saw, the robots in the kitchen doing it, those are fully embedded neural net weights that live on GPU. The robot wasn't actually connected to any network. It doesn't need to be connected to any network. We can basically see through cameras. We have battery power. We could run those weights through a GPU on board and we can output actions and torques to the motors. So, I think in general, we ultimately want to make sure nobody can get rude access to any kernels in the system. We want to sit everything in terms of what the robot ultimately can never do in non -biletile memory on firmware, which we do today.

25:31So you want to think about it, ultimately comes down to the robot, ultimately can't do certain actions. So trust him. Let's go ahead and cartee. Hey guys, thank you so much for your wisdom. Brett, a year, a moonshot venture builder, Vinodier, a moonshot investor, similar to the question that's actually sitting up there, voted up. What's your advice to moonshot ventures and their founders and their teams in terms of building a roadmap when the underlying technologies or even the convergence of the technology doesn't quite exist yet?

26:09You know, I do believe companies are more successful if they raise in stages because it puts more pressure to achieve milestones. The more comfortable you feel, the less you will explore the options and look for better ways. Now, you think companies can be over capitalized though and become lazy? My experience, I did this analysis a few years ago. The less money a company raised, the more likely it was we were to make more absolute dollars. I'm not even talking about rates of return. Why? Because they spent a lot more time Examining their assumptions and testing them in increments. So this is very counter intuitive It's the opposite of the soft bank strategy.

27:11Yes. It's like it's expressing a vine to get a fine wine Yeah, you it's like stressing a wine to get fine wine detect problems early test everything It's not to say you can't do it if you raise a lot of money and hopefully brought doing that But it generally tends to be people get complacent and complacency is the enemy of innovation. Yeah, and I would say regional out of money early later to scale when you have a path that's. But there's time you need money to scale and that's when you need it. Mark. Thank you. With all the money being invested in AI, what's your thinking about the fact or the possibility that it becomes kind of a commoditized service as opposed to something for which people are willing to pay the amounts of money that's going into it.

28:00Don't listen to the press you read. Right. If a multi trillion dollar economy is to be created, you're going to see massive opportunities take breadth's opportunity. If there's an industry larger than the auto industry in the relatively next two decades, then it doesn't matter how much you invest. The opportunity is large. I would say the following. With what I see in the market, most investments, most companies will lose money. The vast majority may be 80 percent. But more money will be made than lost because of the exponential nature of the winners' outcome. And so by a large, I believe, press likes to write short term headlines, so you have to ignore them.