Build The Future
Build The Future shares the compelling visions of the future and the stories of those building it. We explore frontier technologies, innovative research, and ambitious projects from around the world that will shape our future. Our guests are entrepreneurs, thought leaders, researchers, and anyone else actively working to build the world we want to live in.
Build The Future
#80 - Rajat Bhageria - Automating Food Assembly using Robots and AI
Rajat Bhageria is an entrepreneur, investor, and the CEO of Chef Robotics.
What does it actually take to build and deploy generally intelligent robots? Rajat's company is actively scaling robotics in the food industry and is here to tell us all about it.
In this conversation, we talk about what the current food manufacturing process looks like, the challenges and opportunities in robotics, what the coolest AI and robotics companies are on the market today, why the future might look like WALL-E, and much more.
00:00:00 Introducing Chef Robotics
00:03:50 Automating Food Assembly
00:08:23 Technical Backend
00:16:45 Robotics Complexity
00:22:55 Deployment & Scaling
00:34:39 The Future of Robotics
00:45:22 Startups & Self-Actualization
00:49:01 Positive Vision of the future
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Welcome to the Build the Future podcast. My name is Cameron Wiese and I'm your host. I've always been fascinated by the ideas and the sentiment that drove American culture in the 1960s with the space race, a culture galvanized to dream about the possibilities of tomorrow, whether it's food, transportation, cities, biology or anything else. It was this cultural mindset, rooted in optimism, that the world tomorrow would be better than the world today, a mindset where people were compelled to build things and I quote JFK not because they were easy, but because they were hard. It's this desire to build and to dream that seems to have been lost. It's something we're here to bring back With Build the Future. We're here to promote the ideas and stories of those who see how the future can be better and promote their plans to get us there. It's our mission to get you to dream about the possibilities of tomorrow, to dream about the future that you want to live in, and inspire you to go build.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to the Build the Future podcast. Today we're talking with Brijat Bagheria, the founder and CEO of Chef Robotics Chef. They're not only doing AI and robotics stuff, but they actually have robots out in the market helping food manufacturers pack meals and meal kits you get through Joe's or Costco. They just come out of stealth and I'm excited to share this conversation with an adult and what the future holds. So with that, let's jump right in. Thank you for being here. I pulled Build the Future out of the light. It was like on the back burner. I'm like we got to jam because obviously there's a lot of interesting things going on, but I haven't seen anything on the robotics front that's actually like meaningfully deployed and like being used and growing. And then we got to catch them like okay, cool, we should, let's record something, because people don't think that robotics is actually happening. If they do, they're not exposed to it. So let's start with tell me about the future you're building with Chef Robotics and sort of the vision that you have for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and again, thanks for having me on. I'm super excited, I'm really glad we got connected and I'm excited to have this conversation. Yeah, so I think the future that we're trying to build is one where, you know, in the food industry, we find that these jobs are honestly very tough. A lot of the jobs are in either a very cold environment that's like a refrigerator, basically 34 degrees or it's a really hot environment and Americans basically just don't want to work in these jobs, and the reason is that you're just doing these redundant motions all day long and because of this, there's a really, really crushing labor shortage. So I think the future we'd like to build is one where you know, since you have robots doing these kind of redundant motions.
Speaker 2:So, for example, our initial use case is one where, you know, in these food factories, you essentially have these people who are in a 34 degree room. They're scooping food for eight hours a day. Oftentimes it's frozen material, so like their hands are numb. I mean, I tried this job for like five minutes and it's like my back is hurting and my arm is aching and like literally five minutes and, like you know, it's just a really tough job, and so I think we'd like to work a job where, like we like to create a future where we can have these kind of robots do that kind of day-to-day mundane work and now, with those other people, they can actually do something more better suited for people, right? So continuous improvement, line monitoring, robot operating things like that, and, of course, they're starting in one place. But really what I'd like to see is a world more generally where robots are doing these mundane tasks and humans are doing something better suited for humans, totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we'll sort of come back to that. But for the unacquainted like, what specifically are you guys doing at Chef?
Speaker 2:Within this kind of labor shortage in the food industry, we find that the majority of the jobs are actually in the food assembly portion. Food assembly is basically this idea of kind of taking pre-cut and pre-cooked ingredients and kind of portioning them at the right portion size and then placing them into whatever form you might want. That might be a prepared meal, that might be a sandwich, a wrap, it could be a pizza party tray, yogurt party tray, whatever you might want. So essentially, our goal is really to kind of deploy these robots. I know what we're doing right now is deploying these robots into food factories, right.
Speaker 2:So think about any kind of meal you might find on an airplane, or meals you might find at a hospital Even like Trader Joe's, right or Costco it's like, yeah, exactly Trader Joe's or meals you might find at any Starbucks, for example. That's kind of a starting point and it really makes a lot of sense because it's a really great use case for robots. It's pretty high volume. And then the idea, of course, is that scooping is scooping is scooping. If we can manipulate a chicken and do that consistently without damaging it, without crushing it, and we can do this for thousands of ingredients, then why stop there? Why not go to ghost kitchens? Why not go to fast casuals, prisons, hotels, universities, et cetera? Really, the ultimate goal is to build AI-enabled robots that kind of help automate the human part of this job that is really tough for people and then ultimately allow them to do other things.
Speaker 1:It was something that I hadn't really thought about until you and I were chatting initially. A lot of the food that you see at the grocery store is pre-assembled and it just didn't click. It wasn't something I'd consider. I'm like how does this get made? It's literally giant assembly lines. But everyone's like, oh, hasn't it been automated? No, it has not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, it's really fascinating actually because, like, even when we started Chef, we thought it was automated, which is why we our initial impression of where, to start with, actually fast, casual restaurants. But then we went to a lot of these factories and exactly what you said, it's these like giant assembly lines. You have 30 people on the line and they're scooping and we're like why isn't this done? Why isn't this done by automation? And what we learned is that our customers have actually tried traditional automation. It's just that traditional automation is very kind of. It's traditional for a reason. It's very simplistic automation, right, there's not many sensors. It's not really for a reason. It's very simplistic automation, right, there's not many sensors, it's not really making a decision, it's a bunch of stainless steel, basically, and maybe one motor. That's kind of just doing the same thing over and over again.
Speaker 2:So you can make it work. Let's say, for one ingredient, pick any ingredient you can make a dispenser work, but then if you change how you cut that ingredient or you cook that ingredient, then it won't work so well. Or you cook that ingredient, then it won't work so well. So you know, it's really good if you're, essentially if you have like five SKUs let's say I'm craft times right, I have five SKUs make for like ketchup, right, and five is an arbitrary number 10, 12, 15, whatever it might be A low number. Basically, you essentially get a dedicated custom line for each of the SKUs and you just run it all day long. On the other hand, if I'm making a meal, well, there's 200 different kinds of meals and so now you're not going to get 200 dedicated lines, you're going to get five to 10 flexible lines and you're going to change over. But of course, that flexibility is not something that depositors, suspensors, traditional automation can handle, which is why they end up using people and that's where we can come in.
Speaker 1:Yes, so deployment, walk us through sort of like what deployment looks like for you guys so right now it's humans on an assembly line, presumably. Food is sort of brought in, and then you have humans who are scooping whatever from the pre-assembled pan I think it's like the hotel style giant pans into these pre-assembled or the sort of preset containers, right, and then just one after another, over and over, and over and over again.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly Exactly so, like a status quo is exactly that. So you have like each human right now has kind of a big tub and they're kind of scooping. Maybe the first two people on the line on either side are doing rice and the next person is doing a meat and the next person is doing some vegetables, et cetera, right? So the deployment process for Chef, we really designed it, engineered it, I guess I could say, to really be very simple, and the reason for this is each Chef we kind of call them modules, chef modules. They're the same footprint as a human, which is again on purpose. So the idea is that we're not automating like 10 people or 10 stations, if you will, it's automating one station at a time, right. So essentially the system itself is the same footprint as a human and it's on casters or wheels, right. So you literally slide it onto the line and then the only kind of two inputs we need is really a power line 110 AC, which every facility has, and then a compressed airline, which also every facility has. It's kind of like pneumatics, basically, and they use pneumatics for other equipment on the line, so that's why they have it. And basically you slide it onto the line. You kind of put down the forecasters and essentially you're kind of ready to run.
Speaker 2:At that point, what you're going to do is you're going to tell the robot okay, you know 6am, it's 6am time to run production. What meal am I making? Well, I'm making the pad time here, okay, great. Then it's going to ask you what ingredient you want to run and then you say, well, I'm doing the broccoli, Okay, great. Then it's going to say, great, well, you need to put in your trays of broccoli. You load the broccoli trays, hotel pans and the final kind of step is it's going to say, okay, well, based on the AI policy, i's like a dovetail mechanism to attach the utensil, there's two pins to hold it into place and essentially at that point, that's essentially the only kind of work that the line manager has to do.
Speaker 2:And at that point, basically, the robot will kind of fine tune. It'll kind of pick and dump is what we call it. You kind of pick ingredient broccoli from one tub to the other tub, over and over 10 times or so, until it kind of feels okay, I'm pretty consistent. At that point you press play and and that's kind of it. At that point the system will kind of see that there's trays going down the line and when it sees the first tray it'll say, okay, it's time to pick, and then it'll place and every tray it'll try to get better right. So we actually have weight scales underneath each of the pans to actually get some how much weight we picked up. Then we can say, well, it's too high or too low, let's actually improve the next time.
Speaker 1:Sweet, yeah. So I can imagine that like. Well, the interesting thing that I think happens here is, like most people, so you get it set up, but where does the more like technical component come in? Right Cause you have the stamp, you have the old, what this sort of automation name attempted to like pick up and go. Where's the insight?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the secret or the insight is that, dispensers, by their nature, you can't really have much sensing. It's kind of just doing the same thing over again, right? And I think our insight was okay, well, how does a human A human doesn't care if it's shredded chicken or sticky rice or cheese grits, they don't really care. Well, and how do they do that? Well, they use their eyes, of course, first of all to figure out okay, first of all, what ingredient is it? Second of all, okay, once I understand the ingredient, okay, well, how am I going to scoop? First of all, where in the hotel pan am I going to scoop, like the actual like where? But then also how right I going to have Right? So there's some, there's some perception and there's some intelligence there. And then, of course, they have arms through these motions. And the thing with scooping motions is that with a scoop, you can basically pick up anything. You don't care how it's cut, you don't care how it's cooked, you don't care how sticky it is, so long as you have the right place, you start in the right place and then you have the right motion, you can essentially pick up anything Right. And then the final portion is they have a utensil. And so we essentially said, okay, let's mimic that idea which is we're going to have computer vision to figure out where do I pick from and where do I place. We're going to have a lot of intelligence to have figured out what the motion is and also like, for example, like if I have a very sticky ingredient, I actually need a lot more force to actually kind of go through that material. Or if I'm picking broccoli, if I just like kind of dumbly go through it, then I'm going to like fling the broccoli off. So I need to actually kind of like delicately kind of scoop it in and then maybe jiggle a little bit so that if there's anything that's like about to fall out, it falls in. Things like that.
Speaker 2:And then utensils Basically it's kind of like computer vision, machine learning, motion planning and utensil design.
Speaker 2:So we essentially built our system around that idea which is scooping, and the idea was that every customer, no matter if it's Thai place or Indian place, it doesn't matter what the customer is, doesn't matter what kind of containers they have or conveyors they have or ingredients they have, so long as I have this module which has a six staff arm, an interface to have different utensils and the best CPU and GPU can get at the moment, then essentially I can mass manufacture that hardware, that module and ship it to every customer, no customization whatsoever for a customer, and then basically each ingredient can have its own AI policy and that might be like dozens of different parameters about how do I scoop that ingredient to be consistent, to not damage it, to not spill it, to get the right portion size, all these things.
Speaker 2:And finally the third part, of course, is the right utensils and the utensils. You have kind of a library of utensils. Once you have a good library, you can kind of mass manufacture them as well. You don't need to make something custom per customer after that. So I think that was the insight which is like, instead of kind of having this kind of hardware driven approach, which is very much kind of you know, do the same thing over and over, can we have more of a scooping or software driven approach which is a lot more AI driven?
Speaker 1:So tell me about how you guys are going about doing that, because a lot of the previous like AI, so like on the policies that mentioned policies, it's like okay, here's a predefined set of rules, right, predefined set of rules, right. When you drive like all the this is how wemo and cruise and tesla, or at least how they started out doing it which was like cool. If this, then that hundreds thousands, hundreds of thousands of times. But then something changed in probably what 20 like actually sort of like industry wise, like what? What change that doesn't enable sort of this like computer vision type approach yeah, no, it's a really, really good question.
Speaker 2:So, like you're right, like I think, since like 2014, even like basically what the software and car companies did and like what all the robotics companies did is essentially a rule based system and and rules by the way, there's still a lot of machine learning in the rules it's a rule. So, for maybe an example I can get from the AV world is like okay, I'm going a very simplistic example. I'm going to detect a red light and when I detect a red light, I'm going to stop. That is a rule right Now. The issue with that rules architecture, which is what you alluded to, is that you have a lot of like it gets very convoluted very fast, right. Okay, well, if you're a red light and you know you can, you can turn right, am I allowed to go or not? So, anyways, and that's a very simple, but there's thousands of these different rules you kind of create.
Speaker 2:We started Shaft the same way, right, which is OK. Well, essentially, we were like, ok, let's create like a config. That is kind of what we internally call it. So maybe, like sticky barbecue sauce is going to have a config. I just came up with that, but it's a good example, and the reason I came up with that is because it's sticky, okay. So what does stickiness mean? Well, if I am above the tray, once I've detected the tray that I want to place into and I've tracked it now I have to it's going to take, like, because it's sticky, it's going to physically take the material like a couple seconds to drop down. So we have this like config parameter dwell time. Dwell time is basically the time you like follow the tray before you move on, and that's a parameter that an applications engineer tunes.
Speaker 2:So an engineer basically creates that kind of backbone software and then an application engineer says, okay, because it's a very sticky ingredient, I need, I need to do a little bit more. Or maybe another example I can give is like we're talking about broccoli. So you know we have a utensil that's going to close around broccoli and you know, if I just dumbly close, I'm going to sometimes get one piece, sometimes I'm going to get three pieces and you're going to be very consistent. So we kind of create this like twist motion where basically we try to like fill the tool as much as we possibly can, but there's constraints because these are collaborative robots and if we apply too much force, then they'll protect to stop. It's a safety mechanism. It's meant to be collaborative. So there's a safety mechanism where if you put too much force it'll kind of stop. But of course, if you're trying to pick broccoli, it's very dense material. Yeah, it's more difficult than corn or zucchini or something yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes. So anyways, like and we can talk about this more but basically the way we actually got to production, basically there was a lot of deep learning and machine learning, but each ingredient had a rule about how to leverage that model to do something useful, and these configs had like 200 software parameters apiece. So that's how we got to market and what was beautiful about that approach is it allowed to ship? I think that was the most important, which is like what is the quickest path to getting something useful out in the world? And that's kind of what we started to ship. And what was nice about that is by shipping, we got real production data in the field. Right, we learned about okay, well, actually, the sauces actually are different densities day by day. Or if you have a pan of shredded chicken, it's actually different material properties as you go throughout the pan, because it's different parts of the bird, et cetera. So we learn these like things in the field. So now we get production data. We have a mapping from like image data, basically RGBD, to robot control data about what works and what doesn't work, robot action data. How do we actually, in production, be consistent? How do we not spill? How do we not damage material. How do we place in the right compartment without spreading or spreading based on what the customer wants? And now that we have that production data, now we've started more of an end-to-end approach, which is kind of say, okay, let's go from images and input data to more core robot control data.
Speaker 2:But I think that was only possible because we started with production data. And the reason I say this is, when it comes to manipulation, there's no deformable physics simulators that really exist that are really good. So what a lot of companies do, even autonomous vehicle companies, is that they can train in simulation. Well, chef can't really train in simulation because there's no physics simulators for deformable materials. So the only way for us to get that data was going to production. So, anyways, that was kind of the story right, which is like you have something useful in the world by using this kind of approach that software running driving cars and others came up with, which is kind of like you have rules based on different kind of parameters and then you ship that, you get production data and once you have production data, now you can do a moment and end it.
Speaker 1:Well, and like, I think that's exactly sort of why what I was like fishing for Because the thing that I just the physical world's so complicated and there's all this. I am a hundred percent like profuge, like let's build stuff, but there's this sort of narrative around AI and robotics and oh, it's going to take over everything, and it's like it's not that simple. These things are really complicated and there's no training data. There's like, okay, I'm going to pick up this cup. Okay, well, how do you know? This is paper versus ceramic versus like metal.
Speaker 2:And then it just, and it's even deeper than that, right, just, and, and it's even deeper than that, right, but like from the outside, so it's even deeper. So, like from the outside, you can't tell how much coffee is inside that cup. So, and and, and, by the way, like a human, like, in other words, what I'm saying is vision is not enough. So what a human does is that they use their vision to figure out okay, generally, where do I pick from? But then they there's like appropriate reception, right, so they actually figure out oh, let me, how much force do I need to impart so that I don't that cup doesn't fall out? That's all. That's all real time that humans are doing that, but it's really hard for robots. No, so your point is exactly right, which is that I think.
Speaker 2:I think the sense I get is that and this is just a sense, my opinion right Is that I think a lot of people looked at what happened with large language models and ChachiPT and they're like, what used to happen in the world is we used to have these point models. You have a model that plays chess. You have a model that drives a car. You have a model that, like you know, does some natural language processing, so to say. And now can we have this kind of foundational model where it can do anything? And I think that paradigm actually works quite well for kind of language right, and the reason it does well for language and kind of written stuff basically code and things like that or purely the digital stuff like an image event. It's a purely digital idea. It can work well for that, because there's a lot of kind of language image data pairs on the internet that you just download. So I mean all the LLMs and GPTs and all these foundational models are essentially trained on kind of more or less off the shelf data from the web. And now of course, more people are getting proprietary data with proprietary sources, but generally it's kind of off the shelf.
Speaker 2:Well, I think with the robotics it won't just be like a snap. It was like I think Chachi PD was kind of like a snap right. It felt like it, if you will. I mean, obviously they've been working on it for years, but for the outside world it was like we suddenly have this kind of relevation of transformers and things like that. I think that's not necessarily going to be true in robotics, because the big missing thing is exactly what you said, which is that training data and I would even kind of go so far as to say that a lot of that the simulation is good. But even for non-deformable let's say I was working on a bin picking company or I was working on a palletizing robot company Even then sim is kind of not sufficient, I think.
Speaker 2:I think you really just and the reason for this is the physical world is very highly dimensional. There's a lot of noise in the physical world, like in simulations, everything kind of what you expect. But in the physical world there's like I mean, in the palletizing case, there's like forklift drivers that are coming in and out of the workspace, there's people who are like doing dumb things, there's weird kind of orientations of the pallets. So there's all this noise. You can try to simulate it, but it's always going to be limited compared to what's going to happen in the physical world. And I think the thing then becomes what is the fastest pathway to getting data from the physical world? And I think the fastest pathway is shipping robots. But now you have this chicken and egg problem, right, how do you ship robots without that? So I think it'll happen, but I think it's just going to require companies that are like really maniacally focused on shipping into production, getting data and then using that to make their models better.
Speaker 1:This is kind of the argument for general purpose Robots. Right, like you're, like Rosie from the Jetsons River, you know I love optimists aesthetically and figure cool. I just have a hard time seeing, like, where, like, how do they design these things so that they they can like learn to, like move your laundry? It's like it's so complicated, like, how do you? I don't know, this is a little bit of a deviation, but how do you think about this?
Speaker 2:I 100% agree. I mean, you know one. There's like a bunch of thoughts about this. So, like you know, one way, like a lot of people are comparing like these general purpose robots to self-driving cars. Well, the reality is that self-driving cars, like the first DARPA Grand Challenge that really in my opinion and others might again disagree with this, but I think AV in my head kind of like kicked off with the droid bed band challenge where, like Sebastian Thread and some of these other folks kind of like first competed. That was like 20 or so years ago. So from the time that competition happened right in the early 2000s to now was two decades ago.
Speaker 2:And I think my opinion is that general purpose robotics and humanoids will probably take around the same. And one way, it's basically a time horizon question, right, it's like maybe that happens, but how long is it going to take? And then there's some other kind of angles to think about it from. So one angle to think about it is like essentially the walking part is honestly not the hard part. I think we've kind of figured out walking.
Speaker 2:The hard part is manipulation, right, and yet we have not as a humanity figured out manipulation. I mean like forget deformable goods. What we're doing is deformable, like food is hard in and of itself, but we haven't even figured out non deformable goods. I mean, there's companies, many companies, and we can talk about some of them in particular if you'd like, but bin picking is just not a solved problem by any stretch of the imagination. So now we still haven't solved that basic like how do you pick up that like coffee cup you just talked about, or different objects you might have around? We haven't even figured that.
Speaker 2:And now we have to add that on to this other problem, which is okay, well, half of my compute, half of my load resources are being used to like not fall down and like there's a lot of safety ramifications. Anyways, all these will happen. I'm not saying that won't happen, I just think that like it's a little bit early, which is to say like I think we need to just solve manipulation, adding legs onto it. It's a good vision, right, but it just we just need to solve the manipulation part and I think, just focusing on just getting manipulation in a good place, then you can have another like put instead of an arm mounted like for chef, instead of an arm mounted on like casters, you can put an arm on on legs. That's fine, it's great. But just the hard part is manipulation, and just focusing on the problem is an important thing.
Speaker 1:You can't just, you can't just toss the legs on it right now and be like oh cool, now it's somewhere where it's like yeah, so it's more of an order of ops, yeah it just exactly, and this is so easy to do.
Speaker 2:Demos, I mean, I think there's a lot of really compelling demos. I think what I'm really impressed about is when somebody actually ships production robots, because in production, you know, manufacturers just don't care, they're just like output, right. They don't care about the technology, they don't care about imitation learning, they don't care about transformers, they just care about output. Give me reliability, give me throughput, give me flexibility, give me the things they care about right. I'm really impressed by the companies that actually ship in production.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you guys are one of the leaders. How many meals have you guys helped assemble?
Speaker 2:Right now we're at 22 million. I think 22 million Incredible.
Speaker 1:So you're getting real data and real customers are using this to like improve their, their processes, which I think is just like again. That's why I'm like, okay, we gotta, we gotta do a pod, because it's like you don't hear that every day. It's like oh, there's another demo, one on x, or you know like someone got a funding round for this. Like do you have stuff in the market? Like so, like who. And I think back to your question like who is who else has stuff in the market. You're like, okay, this is this question. Like who is who else has stuff in the market? You're like, okay, this is, this is cool, like this is meaningful, like there's stuff going.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's a few that I'm like I'm really impressed by, and this first one I'm going to say is maybe like one company that actually has done it well. So there's this graph. I saw, and maybe you've seen it, like the Tesla FSD miles driven right, right, and I don't know if you've seen it's like kind of exponential curve and they're doing like a billion miles. I think that that. So I I think here's what's funny, right and and again, like there's not like a right answer for this, just different opinions. I remember, like when I first started in robotics, like everyone was essentially making fun of tesla for their whole approach of like you know, obviously cameras, but also other things, but just shipping something. And a lot of people had this approach of, okay, no, like we're going to raise tens of billions of dollars in funding, like the Waymo approach or the cruise approach, right, and we're going to try to learn, so to say, in a lab, and then over time we'll get to a full autonomy. And Tesla said, no, we're going to ship a bunch of vehicles, get production data and improve over time. I'm not saying that that approach has definitively won, so to say, but it really seems like people are pretty happy with FSD 12, the imitation learning part of it, and it seems like that's working and that vision is exciting. So if you look at like Tesla as a robotics company, arguably they're an extremely successful robotics company because they have production robots that are using imitation learning to actually like, successfully drive around cities. That's pretty cool. Other robotics companies I'm really impressed with probably the like and this one's a little bit like. It's an interesting example, but I think it's still it's necessary to call out which is Amazon Robotics. So Amazon Robotics actually has they have the biggest fleet of robots in the world and I say intelligent. Now kind of the ding again and that's hundreds of thousands of robots. Right, the ding against Amazon is that, well, it's not the ding, it's still very impressive. It's just like they're not deploying these robots at other customer sites. So if you're deploying your own facility, you can kind of engineer the facility to be perfect for robots. Let's make it really easy, let's have April tags everywhere, let's really basically just like, make it perfectly amenable for robots. But obviously, if you go to a different customer site which is what we have to do and other robotics companies have to do then you kind of have to deal with their randomness, that high dimensionality, which you don't have to do if you'd engineered them in space. But anyways, I think it's really impressive nonetheless, what they've been able to do.
Speaker 2:A couple others that I'll call out that I think are impressive. So I think the colloquial one that everyone talks not everyone, but many people talk about is locus robotics. So locus robotics makes these kind of amrs. These are robots that kind of help with like picking, you know, in a warehouse, a 3pl or e-commerce warehouse. Right, you need to like assemble a, a kit or a, you know, basically move materials around. And you have a human who's kind of like taking an object here, taking an object here, taking an object here, and these robots essentially kind of just help them do that and kind of follow. It's not actually doing the manipulation. The human is actually doing the manipulation, but the robot is actually kind of just like. Essentially it's a guy if you think about it. It's kind of like a moving shopping cart, if I were to simplify it quite a bit but it'll also do other things. They move pallets around and stuff like that. So they've deployed a lessons to be learned from them.
Speaker 2:But I think the point still stands, which is there's not hundreds of robotics companies who have shipped production robots.
Speaker 2:There's like tens that are.
Speaker 2:And when I say production robots, I mean intelligent robots. There's like thousands of companies that have shipped dumb robots, which are these kind of robots you might find in car factories that are doing the same thing over and over again. Right, these are robots that are essentially hard-coded. They've been around for 40, 50 years, kind of a solid problem. You go to Systems Integrated, they'll make you, they'll buy a robot from FANUC and they'll like, do some PLC programming and like and do the same thing over and over again. That's kind of a again, I don't want to say solid, but I think it's a pretty stable place. I mean, I think you can basically solve any problem you want within some limitations, but essentially most problems you can solve that way for applications where it's very low flexibility needed. So if you just want to do the same thing over and again, like I'm making millions of iPhones, done right, just get a custom line that just does that. But when it comes to intelligent robots that are kind of making decisions and having to be flexible, there hasn't been a ton.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a really, really important distinction for people, because they're like oh wait, they have robots in factories. It's like, yeah, for giant assembly lines.
Speaker 2:But the sort of places where there's a little bit of like, at least right now, human intervention needed is the place where, like, that hasn't been entirely taken over yeah, I mean a good example just to like finish the car analogy is, like you know, the the first kind of kind of parts, the early parts of car manufacturing line will will actually be fairly automated.
Speaker 2:There's these giant fanuc and kuka and abb arms if you were to go to the ford plant or the tesla plant, really any any kind of car oem but then you go to general assembly, which is kind of the last phase and it's extremely complex. And I mean the classic example a lot of people talk about is like kind of adding the wire harness right, it's like this kind of deformable, bendable thing. You have to like finagle this around the chassis of the car. I mean that's just very hard and you have all these people doing it. But but there's a lot of examples for that. Where the last phase is very flexible, there's a lot of these like deformable parts or moving parts and changes. So that's a lot of humans and that's where intelligent robots would be in this, in this equation.
Speaker 1:So it's like the problem like last mile delivery, it's like it's really really good up until that, also bet, and then it gets super complicated. Okay, I think that's a really good sort of picture of the landscape on robotics right now that most people, myself included honestly like may not be completely aware of, like is there anything else you think the average like person or general public like may not know about robotics or that may have like misperceptions about?
Speaker 2:misconceptions about right now. It's a very good question. So, like I mean, I think like, yeah, we kind of talked about the data bit, which I think is the really hard part. We kind of talked about there are these production robots, but they're for low mix applications and high mix, so to say, where you have varieties, where you need intelligent robots, and we talked about how it's different from like language. I guess a few other things I'd call out. I think you know here's actually an interesting one.
Speaker 2:So I think robotics is one of those industries more like in, you know, in startup world we often hear about, like in polygram talks a lot about this, but but I think a lot of people talk about how the number one reason startups fail is they build something nobody wants, right. I think that's especially true in robotics. I would say, and why is that is? It's because, like in robotics, it's these very technical founders, right, like these really incredible engineers. It's very easy to kind of build something that's kind of a cool technology. It's very easy to build, but it's really hard to take that next step with building a product and it's even harder to take that further next step which is a solution. So here's what I mean by that, you know, in the food. I'll just talk about the food world. I mean in the food world, like you cook at home a lot maybe not you, but I'm saying people cook at home a lot and they're like, oh, cooking is what I should automate. So you have these like robots that do cooking, like burger flipping, things like that. The issue, you find, is that if you actually talk to customers and you actually really understand what they're facing, what you find is that cooking actually scales relatively, not sublinearly. You know it takes one person to cook at your house for a few people, but it also takes one person to flip 50 burger patties, like one person can actually do a lot, because one person can kind of it's kind of batches basically, and so the pitch of robotics is really tough. For example, that's something that's not intuitive.
Speaker 2:And if you were to just build a technology, you end up building a cool cooking robot, but that actually really does not solve any customer problems, because you're going to go to the customer and say, hey, we have this cool cooking robot, but that actually really does not solve any customer problems, because you're going to go to the customer and say, hey, we have this cool cooking robot and they're going to say, okay, great, how many people can I kind of offset and have them do something else? And you're going to say, well, you can offset them, but our robot's going to fail sometimes you still need that person actually. And they're going to be like, well, there's not really an ROI anymore, right, right, so that that's something that's like not obvious, right, I think. So One of the things we try to do is actually sell the product before building it, and what that gets you is like you really like as soon as you have to ask for money, people really tell you what they really want and you can actually work backwards from requirements, as opposed to let's just build a cool thing. That same idea, I think, is true in a different way. So, like now, let's say, you have a general kind of thing that people want, right, when it comes to robots, I think even then it's kind of really easy to focus just on the core, like computer vision and motion planning or AI or whatever hardware, whatever it might be, and sometimes not think so much about the rest of the solution. So here's what I mean.
Speaker 2:So in Chef world, we got to make something that's very flexible and the more ingredients it can do, the more like different kinds of, you know, consistencies it can deal with, and textures and things like like how do we pick up a blueberry without squishing it the more we can do. Obviously, it's very useful. It's very, very useful Now, but it's not so. It's not. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient. So what also matters is things like okay, well, the users who are going to use this line are usually non-English speaking, often not college educated. They're not. They haven't really dealt with technology outside of maybe their like smartphone. So, okay, like it's.
Speaker 2:Things like the things that matter also like okay, is the entire interface in Spanish? Is the entire interface as simple to use as, like Netflix? The things that also matter might be like how easy is it to clean the thing? Like sanitation, how human, safe is it? I mean, these are things that are honestly not sexy, right? Like, making an interface into Spanish is not the most technically complex thing you might have to do, but that's what separates a technology into a product and a product into a solution, because I can have the most flexible robot. By the way, maybe somebody can build a robot that's extraordinarily technically competent, but if it's not usable. People don't want to use it on the line. Or the sanitation team hates to use it, or the production team finds it annoying. They're not going to use it.
Speaker 1:And so you have to sort of feel like it's all sort of like integration into again into the real world. It's like, hey, how's this going to interface with everyday people? Right, it's not like. I mean, there's sort of an argument for like on the ghost kitchen stuff, like if you were fully automated. Like there's this restaurant in San Francisco that had this sort of like assembly line where I was just picking the ingredients. Like you had a whole team of people who were at some industrial kitchen who are prepping all the ingredients and like loading them in, and so it's like it ends up being kind of at least in that it's like kind of gimmicky. Same with the, the robot cafe x, yeah, like sfo. It's like it's cool oh, I think photos of it, but it's not actually solving a problem. Like I'd rather go to the starbucks so I can talk to the barista and be like hey, actually can I do this without like six pumps of like vanilla syrup, because I don't want nobody who wants that or I don't want that versus like entertainment.
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting to sort of differentiate between like with robotics. It's like what's what's being done for entertainment? Like battle boss, great cool. Like more of that please, but larger, ideally. Yeah, they're not actually solving a problem Exactly Like if we were to. If we sort of like imagine, imagine a future where robots are solving like a lot more like real problems, not just superficial ones like what, what does that world look like? And so this sort of connects to you, mentioned to me. You're hoping that with Chef, you inspire a lot of other people to do more like real, practical, impactful things with AI and robotics, and I want to sort of see if I can get you up on a soapbox to riff on what some of those things might be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's really important. So, like actually early on in the Chef history, like again, robotics is not easy, honestly. So there was a moment in the early days when I was like this sucks right. Like you know, like it's like every day is hard, like dealing with physics is hard, everything's just hard about it, right. And then you, even even if you get the thing to work, then the customer is like, oh, but this isn't, it's just like everything's hard and there's supply chain issues and there's deployment issues and customer support issues, and customer support is just not on the online. It's like you go to the customer site sometimes, etc. Anyways, there's a moment where I like I had a conversation with another friend in the software chuck space and I was like this sucks, like why are we doing it? Why don't we just do like sass or something, just something easier? Like, basically, I was considering quitting, right, and he had a really interesting response which is like I still remember to this day, which is like, yes, it's really hard, but that's kind of why we're doing it. Which is, which is to say, like we're kind of in the era of Friendster and Facebook hasn't happened. Or in the era of, like Shockley Semiconductor and Facebook hasn't happened. Or we're in the era where, like, we're still using taxi cabs and Uber hasn't happened. In other words, like I think it's like and I really like this point which is like we're doing it because, like, if we can actually succeed, not only can we make our company successful, which is great, but hopefully we can inspire all these other founders and engineers and entrepreneurs and investors and operators, everyone else to do AI and robotics. And I was like holy crap, that's pretty cool, that's pretty exciting. And so we I went home and I was like, okay, like that's gotta be our mission statement, which is like it's not about chefs succeeding per se. It's like how can we kind of inspire other founders to do AI and robotics? And it kind of reminded me of this, like we were talking about Olympics at the beginning. We were like the four minute mile right Before, nobody really thought about, nobody thought the four minute mile was possible, and then one person did it, and then there's a ton of four minute milers, right, I think that's exactly what I hope to be able to do with Chef, which is the food industry is huge. It's arguably one of the biggest industries on planet Earth. I hope that we can make Chef into an insanely successful company, deploy tens of thousands, millions of robots Great, amazing. But I think more than that, I hope that what we can do is inspire other people to take that and solve these other really important problems. And what are those other important problems, right? So let's talk about that, these other really important problems, and what are those other important problems, right? So let's talk about that.
Speaker 2:One kind of simple way to think about this is kind of literally, go to the Bureau for Labor Statistics and go down and what are the biggest labor forces on planet Earth? Right, and on an international scale, it's actually agriculture and food. So I mean, outside of the US, agriculture is still number one, actually, from a labor force perspective. I think labor force force is a good proxy for the market size for robotics, I would say. But in the US you kind of just go down, you're like, okay, what are the biggest occupations? And then each of those has literally like opportunities for like trillion dollar companies, literally like it's a billion dollar market. It's a trillion dollar markets because the human labor market is $45 trillion of global GDP. It's like any particular market is a trillion dollar, not any, but most of the big ones are trillion dollar markets, yeah, yeah. So I mean I'm pretty excited about like obviously I'm really excited about food just because I think I'm excited about food, because it's a really big market. It's the number one labor shortage in the US. It's over a million jobs unfilled and it seems technically tractable, like it seems like it's possible in the short term.
Speaker 2:But I think there's a lot of others that I'm excited about. So construction is one that I think actually is getting a little bit of love. There's Dusty Robotics, there's Built Robotics, there's some companies there, civ Robotics, there's some love there. But I think construction is one of those mega industries where there's so much more that we could do there. So I think, and I hope, that there's more there.
Speaker 2:I think medical robotics is one where you know, obviously, with the DaVinci system, with Intuitive Surgical, I think that's actually a pretty crazy company. It's worth like 70. I didn't check lately, but last I checked it was like $70 billion in market cap. But the Intuitive robot, the DaVinci robot, is still like controlled by a physician, right, it's still a surgeon who's actually controlling it and and the robots kind of just helping essentially prevent you from having errors. But, but I think more, more surgical robots right, would be actually really, really important.
Speaker 2:And then and then I think I think, like right now there's a lot of like robotics companies that are in manufacturing warehousing. I think mainly that's because of the rise of e-commerce as of late and I think that's great. I I think, yes, we need, we need that, but then you know, you, you that, but then you just go to manufacturing plants, general manufacturing plants, and there's literally thousands of people a lot more than you might expect who are just doing these manual tasks any from machine tending and just working with different equipment. Essentially, there's some tasks that are still manual, like clothing, and stuff is a very manual task clothing manufacturing, making shoes, so anyways, like basically take any job in the physical world. There's literally like at least a 10 to 100 billion, potentially a trillion dollar company to be made. This is amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So it's like the goal is to sort of like lay the scaffolding or sort of like be the form of them either, but in a way that like, well, here's all this other knowledge, that like, or here's sort of the learnings. And in the same way I'm going to make the Amazon comparison it's like hey, they were able to ship on existing freight lines and they had the internet. They didn't have to do a bunch of this innovation, just like oh, all these pieces sort of came together, oh, what is now possible? And it got people asking the question, I think, when people see 22 million mail served like whoa, oh, this is working, oh, we have to be very specific about the problem we're solving.
Speaker 1:Oh, and building stuff for customers. I'm like, okay, what else can we replace? People are going to be like, okay, cool, this can be done. Chef's doing it in food. Okay, well, I'm going to go try and be able to market on shoe construction. It's like, sweet, cool, all right, go for it. I guess. What does our world look like then as a result? Like what's our 20 years out? Have you seen Wall-E? I have seen Wall-E. I have some interesting takes on Wall-E, but let's do yours not over it.
Speaker 2:I watched Wall-E and this was like obviously like it's an old movie now, but it was pretty cool, right. And one thing that was really interesting is like there are some like general purpose robots in Wall-E. There are some general purpose robots in WALL-E, but almost all the robots are for some reason. Wall-e is a trash compacting robot, but the trash compacting robot doesn't need to do some other task. In our use case. This is kind of coming back to humanoids, I guess a little bit, but in our use case, which is assembling these meals, having a humanoid is negative value. It's like you don't need that. The solution works as good as it needs to. Anyways, what I mean to say is like what I'd hope to create is is is a world like WALL-E, right? Which is like you have tens of millions of kind of these robots that are kind of doing these day-to-day tasks, and then you have you have some kind of general purpose robots that are doing specific tasks that like make sense for those general purpose robots Like I think the toad carrying application and a lot of like automotive plants actually is a good example where, like great that example, I can see that making sense, and maybe there's millions of those tens of millions of, like, specific robots for some specific thing, and then millions of robots for these more general purpose tasks, and then I think what ideally well, not ideally, but almost certainly what's going to happen, is what's happened in prior kind of revolutions, industrial revolutions, where it's like the tractor or like the steam engine or the printing press or the G-throw toll, like what's always happened is these inventions create, like, basically they reduce the cost and the economy swells. And the economy swells Because the economy swells. Business people open up more businesses, right, they create more factories and more stores or more whatever, and now there's more jobs and this whole cycle continues and basically the abundance increases, the price of goods decreases, and I think abundance is really the goal, which is how do you like, in the food world, how do you create a world where the cost of fresh food goes down marginally so that it's equivalent to the cost of fast food, for example? Or how do you create a world where housing is, because of this construction innovation, is much more affordable, right, it's not affordable housing, but rather all housing can be much cheaper than it needs to. I think, really creating a world where the affordable right, like it's not affordable housing, but rather all housing, can be much cheaper than it needs to.
Speaker 2:I think, really creating a world where the abundance right, right, we're like, we're like. I don't think there's going to be this world. I do not think there's going to be a world where, like, humans are out of work. Right, because anytime there's like, like the invention of social media, for example, led people whose whole job it is to do social media. That was not a job before, so there's going to be a lot of new jobs created. I don't think people are going to be out of a job, but hopefully they can like, invent and they can wander and they can do these things that they previously couldn't do and do things that are better for humans and robots do these mundane tasks.
Speaker 1:Totally Okay. I'm going to ask this sort of obvious sort of like challenging do you think about? Is sort of someone building this, this technology, like how do we, how do we sort of make sure we don't fall into the? Just sort of sit in big like big chairs and, be you know, drink slushies and just plug in tune in, drop out, uh, that a lot of people may find super attractive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's a good question. My opinion is that that's not going to happen so long as we don't kind of screw up. From a policy perspective, I would say so I mean what I mean specifically. I guess what I'm referring to is like I think, like COVID was actually a really good example of this where, like people gave out all these stymie checks and right, like a lot of people just left work and they kind of stayed home and they invested in, like all these like GameStop and all the games.
Speaker 2:Yeah, degenerate online gambling. Yeah, that only happened because there's an abundance of money and people did not have work. Right, in this case, I think, like it's not that, it's not that like I. I think if we don't do something dumb from a policy perspective, I think there's just going to be people. You actually have to retrain yourself, you have to figure out something new, you have to do that work. But in our case, for example, nobody's being laid off. They're becoming roper operators, they're doing other tasks, they're actually furthering their career, and I think people need money First of all. They need money, but also they need to feel like they're making progress in life. People want to do something. So my opinion is I don't actually think that's going to happen and I think the only thing, the best thing we can do to prevent that just prevent some kind of governmental policy thing that's going to provide an influx of free capital. Basically, I think I'm not a fan of UBI and things like that. Basically, for example, on that note, yeah, I'm with you on that.
Speaker 1:Like the new study that just came out that Sam Altman funded was like very revealing. People were like, oh, hey, actually this doesn't move the needle the way you think it does. I mean, the other thing with that is like what we want to do is sort of hey, you don't have to. Like labor force has shifted, so there's all these other options for you. Now, like you could just watch Netflix and scroll TikTok, but there's a spiritual calling. I was like this is my call to adventure. Like oh, wait a minute. Like is this what I want to do? Or like what else can I do? I can do anything. Anything is possible. So let me, I want to go start a robotics company. It's like that's where I'm like my sort of like hero's journey, my own sort of adventures, like finding a mountain worth climbing and going to pursue it, and then I think that's right.
Speaker 2:I mean like I think that's exactly right, which is like kind of sick. I think the goal of antibodies is to kind of continue going up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right like towards self flexualization. And I think, like I think there's some, there's some would say that that's like not possible, like anytime. You have some people that can self-isolate. You need to have some people that cannot just like but but, but, I think generally bringing the entire everybody closer too. And maybe one interesting example of this is like gig economy. So when I talk to people in the food industry, for example, they explicitly say that it seems like things got a little bit worse in this decade or sorry, not this decade, the 2010s and they kind of credit that to the gig economy.
Speaker 2:Which is to say, previously, if you were at a college, right out of college or in high school, whatever, what do you do? You go to a restaurant or something right. You go to work at a restaurant. But now what can you do? Instead of being all sweaty in a hot kitchen working on somebody else's hours, you go work for Uber and you're kind of sitting in an AC car and it's much more nice and things like that and that was only possible because of technology, and I would hope that, to your point, as more and more technology happens and kind of gets productionized, you usually have more choice. As opposed to having to do it, you can do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think there's sort of a cultural component to it too, which is like making certain things more desirable than others. It's like, hey, it's a good thing to go, be uncomfortable for a while, but like hey, there's so much choice in the world, like you don't have to do this forever, but like this is you know you, like you level up, it's like an opportunity for you to improve and get better, rather than like just be comfortable 100% of the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm very excited about this feature, right, like I think like I've been very lucky in my personal life where I've been able to focus on things that I'd like to do, right, and I think that's amazing and it seems like same with you, but that's for so few people. I mean, it's literally like the vast majority of the world, billions of people right, they're kind of working paycheck to paycheck and they're just doing it because they have to do it. But wouldn't it be incredible if they had a little more choice? Right, like some of the basic goods of life food, shelter, all these things are cheaper. Right, there's more abundance when it comes to those materials.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting, like economics is a study of supply and demand. Right, it's a study of kind of it's kind of the study of scarcity, if you will, is the way one like economist put it. So, if you don't have scarcity, if you have abundance, then a lot of economics and it breaks down because you already have a lot of these goods just like freely available, right, and and then hopefully these people can kind of do do whatever they would like to do. Now, that's not exactly whatever they would like to do, is probably still a job, but they have more choice in that job.
Speaker 1:I'm going to save the discussion of like okay, what's sort of like a abundant future, sort of like economic system. Look like that's you know post. That's not like capitalism or communism or anything else. Like what is a new. What is this sort of like new economic system look like when we have incredible abundance through you know, limitless energy and material goods? And like automated labor and AI. But that is, that is for another day. One question before we wrap other than parts of Wall-E where else have you seen a positive vision for a future enabled by robotics published Like in books, films, essays? When you sort of are using what do you point to?
Speaker 2:This is sort of like what we're going for I mean, a few thoughts are coming to mind and some of them are like anti-stories, right, so, like isaac asmo writes a lot of like, not anti-stories, but like he kind of talks about like, like with irobot and others. Right, what can go wrong? Yeah, right, I mean, I think the classic example that many people might call out is like things like star wars right, we have these. Like robots are kind of like these little you know beings, that kind of help you, I, I would say that, like you know, honestly, like the thought that's also going to my hands like there hasn't been like a very clear. There isn't like the story of like wow, like that's so, like, which is kind of like the whole reason.
Speaker 2:I kind of came back to this, which is like I was thinking about quitting and it's like okay, like, why are we doing this? It's like there wasn't a clear like aha, that's why we're doing it. I think, like, so from like, I guess I'll just say for me personally right, like, who inspires me is like people who have like, who have like done it, and and I would say like, I think, like you know, elon is somebody who's like inspired probably billions of people on this planet because he, like he took this thing that like nobody thought was possible and he made it doable. And you know, you look at his like background, it's like sure, like yeah, there's some all these theories about like whatever, but like I'm sure he's a smart person, but like okay, if you can do it, why can't any of us? Right me personally, I'm less inspired by like science fiction or like fiction or writing or any of that.
Speaker 2:I think more inspired by like biographies, if you will, like people who have like done it themselves, and I think in a lot of industries there are success stories, right. So, like, if I'm building a marketplace, I'm going to be inspired by Travis Kalanick or Tony Zhu. Some people have opinions, but whatever, maybe Tony Zhu, you're inspired by whatever. If I'm running a semiconductor company, maybe I look towards, like you know, the early guys at Intel and Andy Grove and maybe look at Morris Chang at TSMC. But who do I look for for AI and robotics? Well, I can maybe look at like I don't know, like it's kind of something we talked about, but there isn't that company or that person. So I hope that. I hope and this is a very bold claim but I hope that I and my peers in robotics and help like really become one of the early success stories and help create that playbook for others. Amen.
Speaker 1:Love it. That's a great note to wrap on. Where can people find you? Where do you want to point them to?
Speaker 2:I think Twitter and LinkedIn are the best. I'm just at Rajat Pagiriya, find me both there and then If you are interested you know if you are, you know, interested in Chef system, chefroboticsai, and, on the other hand, if you think this is an exciting mission, also feel free to reach out as well.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, man, this has been a blast. Thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you, Cam. This was fun. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Build the Future podcast. If you loved it, we'd be really grateful if you share it with a friend.