When do robots become useful workers?

And I think in industry, industrial robots will definitely be like that, where you can optimize the robot for the specific task, whether it's a laboratory or a production line, you'd want quite different types of robots. On the other hand, for general use or personal use robotics, and just interacting with the ordinary world, the humanoid form factor could be pretty important because of course we've designed the physical world around us to be for humans. And so, steps, doorways, all the things that we've designed for ourselves, rather than changing all of those in the real world, it might be easier to design the form factor to work seamlessly with the way we've already designed the world. So I think there's an argument to be made that the humanoid form factor could be very important for those types of tasks.

We haven't necessarily looked at labor replacement for spot. While that is a metric you might look at, we thought about how do we bring spots in there to augment human labor? One, humans weren't doing the task. Even if they were tasked with it, they weren't actually doing it. Two, we're just trying to figure out ways that humans can do more knowledge work or task as opposed to going and doing inspections. Yes, one of the metrics the customer might look like for ROI is labor replacement. We're leaning more into how much do we save you? We found an air leak in your facility, and that would have been $3 million a day.

Yeah, it's about, we think about like, there's not many customers that are going to pay for that because the ROI is just like not clear, not there, no big energy or manufacturing company is going to be like, yeah, let's do that and I'll pay you like 10 million bucks a year to do that. And so we're collecting it by solving for important problems on critical infrastructure and assets of which we're walking around these Manhattan-sized refineries all the time. And so there's information data sets that we're just building because...

And the refinery inspection is done by a human today.

We haven't necessarily looked at labor replacement for spot. While that is a metric you might look at, we thought about how do we bring spots in there to augment human labor? One, humans weren't doing the task. Even if they were tasked with it, they weren't actually doing it. Two, we're just trying to figure out ways that humans can do more knowledge work or task as opposed to going and doing inspections. Yes, one of the metrics the customer might look like for ROI is labor replacement. We're leaning more into how much do we save you? We found an air leak in your facility, and that would have been $3 million a day.

And I think in industry, industrial robots will definitely be like that, where you can optimize the robot for the specific task, whether it's a laboratory or a production line, you'd want quite different types of robots. On the other hand, for general use or personal use robotics, and just interacting with the ordinary world, the humanoid form factor could be pretty important because of course we've designed the physical world around us to be for humans. And so, steps, doorways, all the things that we've designed for ourselves, rather than changing all of those in the real world, it might be easier to design the form factor to work seamlessly with the way we've already designed the world. So I think there's an argument to be made that the humanoid form factor could be very important for those types of tasks.

Yeah, and the hard part, as I understand it, with these robots is you can train them to do a specific action, like running that race or jump or whatever. But the hard part is when they encounter a condition that they weren't programmed to expect, and specifically when they have to interact with something in the physical world, that's when it gets tricky, right? Can they do the whole folding laundry or pick something up without breaking it or dropping it or whatever? And specifically something that they weren't taught to do, you know, that's where it gets tricky.