No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Kyle Vogt joins Sarah and Elad on this week’s episode of No Priors. A serial entrepreneur, Kyle co-founded Twitch, transforming live streaming, and later Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company acquired by GM for $1 billion. Now he’s taking on AI-powered home robotics with The Bot Company. In this episode, Kyle shares his journey building transformative tech companies, the challenges of scaling autonomous systems, and why he believes home robots are the next frontier. They also discuss the parallels between AVs and robotics, overcoming consumer skepticism, US vs. China manufacturing, and the policies needed to foster a competitive robotics industry.

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Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

0:29 Founding Cruise

3:12 Tesla vs. Waymo approach

4:44 Scaling autonomous vehicles

10:03 The Bot Company

16:35 Deploying robots in the home

17:56 Parallels between robots and AV markets

20:51 Personifying robots and overcoming consumer skepticism

25:00 Timeline on consumer robots

26:47 Chinese vs. US manufacturing

29:15 Fostering a competitive domestic robotics industry

34:00 Lessons from Cruise & personal philosophies

In this episode of No Priors, Dmitri Dolgov, Co-CEO of Waymo, joins Sarah and Elad to explore the evolution and advancements of Waymo's self-driving technology from its inception at Google to its current real-world deployment. Dmitri also shares insights into the technological breakthroughs and complexities of achieving full autonomy, the design innovations of Waymo’s sixth generation driverless cars, and the broader applications of Waymo’s advanced technology. They also discuss Waymo's strategic approach to scaling amidst regulation, deployment in cities like Phoenix and San Francisco, and the transformative potential of autonomous driving on car ownership and urban infrastructure.

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Shownotes:

00:00 Introduction

00:15 History of Self-Driving at Google

00:29 DARPA Challenges and Early Involvement

01:39 Formation of Waymo

01:53 Industry Lineage and Early Skepticism

03:05 Initial Goals and Milestones

4:33 Pivot to Full Autonomy

04:50 Scaling and Deployment

05:29 Generational Breakthroughs

06:59 Choosing Deployment Cities

09:26 Technological Advancements

11:01 Evaluating Safety

14:41 Regulatory Stance and Trust

16:52 Future of Autonomous Driving

23:19 Business Strategy and Partnerships

26:06 Changing Urban Mobility Trends

26:40 Challenges and Misconceptions in Self-Driving Timelines

28:43 The Role of Traditional OEMs in an Autonomous Future

30:54 Designing Cars for Autonomous Ride-Hailing

33:42 Scaling Responsibly

35:18 Generalizability and Future Applications of AI

37:10 The Complexity of Achieving Full Autonomy

42:58 The Importance of Data and Iteration in AI Development

46:13 Reflecting on the Journey and Future of Waymo

This week on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Noubar Afeyan, Co-founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, the biotech firm behind groundbreaking companies like Moderna. They explore how Flagship creates the conditions for scientific breakthroughs, tackles regulatory uncertainty, and pushes the boundaries of discovery. Noubar shares insights on AI’s role in healthcare, the challenges of bringing new therapies to market, and lessons learned from past pandemics. He also discusses Flagship’s platform approach to biotech innovation and introduces the idea of polyintelligence.

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Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

0:48 Founding Flagship

5:51 Fostering environments for emergence

11:17 Expanding into new frontiers

14:26 Developing technology amid regulatory uncertainty and risk

19:12 How Flagship has evolved

22:47 AI applications in healthcare

27:30 Bottlenecks in bringing new therapies to market

32:20 Lessons for the next pandemic

34:11 Building a platform

38:10 Polyintelligence

Today on No Priors, co-founder and CEO of Decagon, Jesse Zhang, joins Elad to discuss the future of agentic customer support. Decagon provides AI-powered customer interactions for companies like Rippling, Notion, Duolingo, Classpass, Substack, Vanta, Eventbrite, and more. Jesse shares the thesis behind starting Decagon, why he sees customer support as the ideal entry point for agentic technology, and what areas of AI excite him most. They also discuss voice-based interfaces, issues with latency in current capabilities, and the connection between young math olympiad communities and today’s AI startups.

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Show Notes:

0:00 Introduction

0:30 Starting Decagon

3:15 Business impact of adopting agents for customer support and customer ops

8:00 AI infrastructure and models for customer success agents

12:05 Voice-based capabilities and text-to-speech engines

15:00 Combatting latency

16:25 Crossover of math and AI communities

21:12 Exciting areas of AI

25:29 Strengths and weaknesses of agents

Humans are always doing work that is dull or dangerous. Brett Adcock, the founder and CEO of Figure AI, wants to build a fleet of robots that can do everything from work in a factory or warehouse to folding your laundry in the home. Today on No Priors, Sarah got the chance to talk with Brett about how a company that is only 21 months old has already built humanoid robots that not only walk the walk by performing tasks like item retrieval and making a cup of coffee but they also talk the talk through speech to speech reasoning.

In this episode, Brett and Sarah discuss why right now is the correct time to build a fleet of AI robots and how implementation in industrial settings will be a stepping stone into AI robots coming into the home. They also get into how Brett built a team of world class engineers, commercial partnerships with BMW and OpenAI that are accelerating their growth, and the plan to achieve social acceptance for AI robots.

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Show Notes:

(0:00) Brett’s background

(3:09) Figure AI Thesis

(5:51) The argument for humanoid robots

(7:36) Figure AI public demos

(12:38) Mitigating risk factors

(15:20) Designing the org chart and finding the team

(16:38) Deployment timeline

(20:41) Build vs buy and vertical integration

(23:04) Product management at Figure

(28:37) Corporate partnerships

(31:58) Humans at home

(33:38) Social acceptance

(35:41) AGI vs the robots