AI Entrepreneurs Q&A: How Every Industry Is About to Be Transformed by Humanoids w/ Vinod Khosla & Brett Adcock | EP #160
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You're going to see robots first in the workforce in like vast numbers. You're going to see them in the home and you're going to start seeing them in space. This will all happen. Bread at cock. Space would be fantastic for humanoids. It's just like such a pernicious place for humans. And the node cause left. Let me give you my most optimistic view of acceleration. The future of work, surgery, and space travel.

Do 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? I 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. This is your time.

Your time. We'll take questions at the mic. We'll take questions on Slido. Let's begin right here. So I'm Mike Wandler. 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 a good half dozen efforts that are high credibility. So that's why I'm pretty confident. Commonwealth, Helion. There's others. There's Type 1. There's...

In fact, every country has their own effort, just like there's sovereign AI, there's sovereign fusion technology coming out. So my only comment I would make is in all these areas of 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 infusion specifically, I think no matter how safe you are, and we are investors in TerraPower with Bill Gates, what will happen is it will take longer to site a power plant

Because of community objections, environmentalist objections, nimbyism, all that, then it takes to develop a fusion technology from scratch. So that's the situation. That's why I've become a little less bullish on fission 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. Let's go to John. Hi, my name is John. This is for Brett.

How soon do you think that there will be the opportunity to have robots in the field for the trades? So I'm in an auto repair business. I want to send a technician out. And secondly, will there be the opportunity to beta and partner with expertise that we have in that with a 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 is like magic numbers, a hundred thousand robots in two. Uh, we have that now with our first two groups. Um,

So we have like we're relatively young. We're still under three years old. Team's like a few hundred engineers. We just don't have the like the truth. So we just don't have like the bandwidth a lot of times to do a lot of extra work outside of what we have. But we're doing a lot of work right now in like other areas like health care, construction, other industry, obviously the home. So I think for us, like to extend the scope.

there's like a mechanical need for mechanical human to be putting those like we want to be like understanding and looking at it more so yeah hopefully hopefully it seems like a really exciting hopefully it's an area we can like spend spend time in the next few years I hope it is too I would love it thank you yeah amazing all right 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? I think the beauty in a humanoid is that we really want to be general purpose.

And when we start customizing, we start making things like really specialized. It's really when you get caught in this like problem of like high energy scenarios, like really hard to keep it reliable, to maintain it, to design it. Then we have like multiple different product paths. And then the AI system, if it's not doing well, like with transfer learning across those different tasks now, embodiments different, the observation space of the robots different, it becomes like really challenging. Yeah.

I think our vision, my vision for this is we have one single hardware platform that can do everything a human can. We 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 is 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 levels. And that's how we're going to get the 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 more likely to be able to operate more and more like a human over time Okay, 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 and

So we will need transmission lines, but let me suggest the following. There'll be different size fusion reactors. So we have Commonwealth Fusion, which is building a 500 megawatt reactor. We have Rialto Fusion that's building 50 megawatt reactors. Now, you can put 50 megawatt

reactors in what is today a substation. What 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 will be an alternative we have. So I am pretty optimistic that will happen. I want to just add a comment on Brett's answer on the last question. Yes.

Customization generally means more cost. And small business, you know, Henry Ford said, you can have any color as long as it's black. The point was reduce the number of SKUs, reduce the cost, increase the volume, and that's the way to make them really affordable. Now, there 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. So I think it'll look very much like the auto industry. It'll 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

in many more places without needing to change the environment.

And people will change some environments.

Then there's Michael Andrej, whose efforts at Eon 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 diamandis.com slash breakthroughs. That's diamandis.com slash breakthroughs. Let's go to Mic 5. 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, housing, food, energy, data, and transportation for $250 a month by the end of the decade. Vinod, you started by asking how will we pay people in the future, and I haven't heard anyone answer that yet. Yesterday, Kathy Woods 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 dissertation on that, I wrote a 25 page piece on AI. Will it lead to dystopia or utopia? So it's on our website. You can Google it. Which one did you choose?

Clearly utopia. Okay, 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 forgot your original question—

- UBI, is it coming? - Job displacement, is it going? Are more jobs going to be displaced and what's the role of UBI? - So I addressed that question extensively in that paper and when what happens. So what happens next five years, what happens in the 2030s and what happens in the 2040s. So 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 a long 5,000-word treatise 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 10 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 policy.

How do we plan to share the abundance more broadly? I don't think the current capitalist system, unmodified, 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, Vinod. Thank you. Neiba.

How do you pronounce your name properly? Nabiha. Nabiha. Thank you. One of our portfolio companies. Yes. It's great to see you, Vinod. 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. I'm getting pretty excited about it. Always wanted to be an astronaut. That hasn't happened. But how do you think...

this space is going to move in the next three to five years. Oh yeah. Thanks. Yeah. We actually, we wrote about this when we started the company or sorry, I wrote about it. Space would be fantastic for humanoids. It's just like such a pernicious place for humans. I think about like colonization, exploring the stars, like it'd be great to send like mechanical embodied agents out to the world and are out to the outer space and have them really help.

help us there. And I think, um, I think you start thinking about like really exciting future where we're like living off planet and how that, how that would work. Um, so I really hope like, uh, like even in the near term, we're like helping to deploy robots there. There was like, there's been, uh, robots developed with NASA that are up in like ISS and have been up before. So, uh, it was like 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 in like vast numbers.

you're going to see them in the home and you're gonna start seeing them in space. And they're kind of like almost like not quite sequentially, but like you're going to happen to see them in certain places first.

in higher quantities, and over time, this will all happen. We'll have robots colonizing planets. We'll have special purpose robots maybe helping out those fully autonomously on Mars and the moon. So it's going to be extremely exciting. It's going to take some time. We've got to work on this on the ground here on Earth first, but we would love to play a part in that. So I would agree with one point

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 leave planet Earth. And I said, 15 years. And his answer to me was, you're way too conservative. Not something people call me very often. So it's a fun fact. Amazing. All right, let's go to Orland on Zoom. Orland, if you're there, what's your question? Yes, hello. This is for Brett. So I'm in the agricultural business. So when should we expect...

the humanoids in agriculture like working in the farms on the rain and sun was that working yeah Brett so when do you expect to see humanoid robots working in the fields um in farming given you know wet all weather conditions totally um I actually grew up on a farm like third generation corn and soybeans agriculture Farm in Illinois so uh it's kind of close to my heart uh so um

I think maybe similar type of through line as the last response. Robots will start indoors. It's better for IP. It's easier because of weather reasons, other things. And we'll start seeing robots from there go outside. There's tons of decent work outside we would love to do. I would say it gets harder there than probably indoors.

Um, 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, uh, to have that, uh, uh, that's incredible. Um, so yeah, so I think like for us, we're like focused right now on trying to get to a hundred thousand units shipped.

That's kind of like where our near-term goals like that we need we need like a certain amount of Like momentum here from the business to get start getting cost down data pipeline built and robots on the word working fully autonomously with no human interventions That for us will be indoors. The next chapter in a book will be the home outdoors. I think all this happened in the next 10 years and

Yeah, I would add the following. 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.

When 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. 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. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is

is going every year for a fountain upload. You know, fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and 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, any 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 Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because health is a new wealth.

But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri. And we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed recently.

in New Mexico, 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 superfoods that are best for you to eat?

Or 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 Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror.

Saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? 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 that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance.

So 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. Amika.

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. What's the second question? And the second question, in terms of fusion and power grids and stuff like that, if my moonshot 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. I think it severely hurt the

kind of civilian commercial market that we're in. We always have like a little Terminator vibe going on with humanoids. So you really want to stay clear of that in our mind. And the market's much bigger on the non-military side. Binod, fragile grid. I've sort of already answered that between super hot geothermal, which applies to most of 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 bet is with energy becoming cheaper, you'll be drilling tunnels under the...

Ground to do transportation lines. Fantastic. All right, I'm going to go to Cole on Zoom, and then we'll go to Zee next after that. Cole. Yeah, Brett, again, under the general purpose, guys, I guess, one of 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 Figure plan to have these humanoids be able to drive a vehicle and do all those things that go along with it?

Yeah. One of my dreams is like have my robots fly and arch your aircraft. Like that'd be, we need pilots, right? It's pilot shortage. I think like one thing that Vinod did a good job on is there's this like,

There's like the ability for the robots to do it and demonstrate it. 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 even a robot drive a car down the street or something like that. And then what we actually plan to do in terms of like where production is heading, where the clients are at, where we're shipping into. Listen, on a long enough time frame, I think these human robots will do everything a human can.

Great.

hacking the system and instead of making the robot do dishes, it could, in theory, make the robot grab a knife and stab their host to death during their sleep. So that was quite deceiving and I would love to

You'd love to experiment with? No, no, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you prevent that. Sorry. Yeah, no, it's great. It's like just watch the Black Mirror episode and came in here. What happens here? Listen, I think one is like we treat like cybersecurity, local security on the robot extremely important. We have a whole team around it. It's not like one solve here to say like, oh, we're going to do this and leave everything on like, you know, non-vital memory on firmware and it'll be fine.

Uh, but we also do that, uh, that will help. Um, I think in general, our robot doesn't need to be connected to a network. So the Helix video you saw other robots in the kitchen doing it, those are fully embedded, uh, neural net way to 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 onboard and we can output actions and torques to the motors. So, um,

So I think in general, like we ultimately want to make sure nobody can get like root access to like any kernels in the system. We want to set everything in terms of like what the robot ultimately can never do in non-vital like memory on firmware, which we do today. So you want to think about it like ultimately comes down to like the robot ultimately can't like do certain actions. So trust him. Let's go to Cartier.

Hey guys, thank you so much for your wisdom. Brett, you're a Moonshot Venture builder. Vinod, you're 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?

You 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.

Do you think that companies can be overcapitalized, 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 counterintuitive. It's the opposite of the soft bank strategy. Yes. It's like stressing a vine to get a fine wine. Yeah. It's like stressing a vine to get fine wine, detect problems early, test everything. Right.

So it's not to say you can't do it if you raise a lot of money and hopefully Brett doing that. But it generally tends to be people get complacent and complacency is the enemy of innovation. Yeah. And I would say raising a lot of money early later to scale when you have a path. 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 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 is going into it? Don'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, right?

Take Brett'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, maybe 80%.

But more money will be made than lost because of the exponential nature of the winner's outcome. And so by and large, I believe press likes to write short-term headlines, so you have to ignore them and focus on, this is why I say I only care about 2030. I don't care about what the stock market's doing today. It's largely irrelevant to 2030. Is it a winner-take-all market?

I think this will be a fairly diversified market and there'll be many winners. There'll be probably three, four, five in each area with a power law distribution of outcomes. But there will be more than one winner. How many robot companies do you imagine? I could see half a dozen given the size of the market, probably less than the number of car companies today. If I'm looking 20 years out. Brett, how about you?

I think kind of agree that it's kind of winner-take-most here. It's like billions of dollars need to be invested. You need to make it at a very high rate, which manufacturing is very difficult. You need to do a lot of data collection. The robots are just a hard business. You look at any deep tech group like, you know, eVTOL, like Satellite or whatever, you know, Space, AVs. You just don't have a lot of groups out there that really make it.

And Vinod's right, 95% of all these go bankrupt through this whole process. So it's tough, but I would say a few. Let's go to one last question here, Yaseeth. Thanks, Peter. This question's both to both Vinod and to Brett. The twin forces with critical healthcare work with shortages as well as three generations of boomers coming to the healthcare system. The robots we see are primarily for social engagement purposes. There's a question online about working with elder loneliness.

My question is in regards to bedside care and direct patient care within basic procedures, for example, nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, you see robots being a viable option in the future to replace humans. Can I twist a little bit? Do you see robot surgeons in the future being the baseline? I do. Yeah. Look,

Healthcare expertise will be free in the next couple of years, like well before 2030. Interventional medicine, so doing a cath procedure, probably take a little bit longer. And the biggest pole in that tent is the FDA, so I'd mentioned regulatory earlier. So I expect we're more than 10 years away from unsupervised robot surgery. Whether we are 15 or 20 years away depends on regulatory standards.

But I want to end on two ideas. When we talk about technology development, there's two things to worry about. One is safety. We haven't talked about it. And I think in the next three to five years, we will make massive leaps in the explainability of models. So I suspect in two to three years, you'll start to hear about

This is no longer a black box, no longer a parrot, all the stuff you hear. The characteristic of our technologies is when you identify the problem, somebody starts working on it, and there's a real safety risk. And really valuable people like Yoshio Banjo or the people I respect and Jeff Hinton have proven

surface the question of AI safety. I think it's a real problem to worry about, but I do believe the optimistic part of me says, I'm already seeing business plans on explaining how these models are coming to their conclusion. And so that will hopefully get solved. So that's one on the caution side. Let me give you my most optimistic view of acceleration.

whatever number of scientists we have in America or on the planet, within five years, we'll multiply that by 10 or 100x. Why? Because we will have AI chemists, AI PhD chemists, AI physicists, biologists, physicists, the acceleration ahead of us.

From AI expertise, not only in the delivery of care like a doctor, but in research where AI scientists is doing hypothesis and then testing it themselves without needing any human intervention in its research.

10 times cheaper and 100 times more abundant in the amount of research. I don't think people have started to imagine that acceleration of science and technology. It really is a rapid intelligence explosion and science explosion. And Brett, I imagine that we're going to see these AI models designing experiments, the robots implementing them and running almost lights out 24-7 and accelerating all of this.

You agree? Listen, both on the physical side of the world and the digital, these agents will do more and more of what we do. That's what's the trend. That's a great optimistic note to end this session. Let's end it there. We're going to have science...

Well, science is shit out of all this stuff. Let's leave it that way. Give it up for Vinod and Brett. Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know what? This year's Abundance Summit, Raoul Pal and Bill Barheit predicted that the tokenization of assets will create an unprecedented amount of wealth.

growing from $3 trillion today to $100 trillion by 2034. That's more wealth than all the Silicon Valley billionaires, Russian oligarchs, Chinese tycoons, and Wall Street bankers combined. Meanwhile, Vinod Khosla explained how AI will multiply our scientific capacity by 10x to 100x within five years.

These opportunities are way too big to miss. I've compiled all the game-changing insights from this year's Abundance Summit into a comprehensive report. You can download that free report at dmandus.com slash breakthroughs and position yourself at the forefront of this wealth creation wave.