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Alex Modon

πŸ‘€ Speaker
170 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

And it's not, you know, always standardized.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

But yeah.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

I do think there is a lot of, there's a lot of tacit knowledge in the industry that helps be more like a shortcut or a rule of thumb to the right answer that you can just first principles drive.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

So there is a scenario where you, you know, you could do a heck of a lot more work when your marginal cost goes to zero, it's totally fine, we solve the problem.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

But like where it really is, isn't like the trades, like the electrician and how they work.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

And there is an incredible amount of tacit knowledge there, which, yeah, I think is both a,

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

Yeah, like a challenge.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

And yes, we need so many more of them.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

I don't know if this is this could totally be the wrong number, but I would guess that the average salary of an electrician in Texas right now is higher than like a Silicon Valley software engineer.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

Like it's incredible, like super demanded.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

Oh, my goodness.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

People are turning to manufacturing for a lot of the data center scope just because there's not enough people in the trades to build these projects.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

And so the only alternative is you mass manufacture these things where you can concentrate labor in a modular scenario.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

Okay.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

even at a premium from a cost perspective.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

So yeah, there is, again, it's a little bit of an all of the above strategy where you would need to say, yeah, we should totally be training more people on very practical skills that are going to be needed for a while.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

And then hopefully start to codify a lot of that so that when we really want to go into scale mode in a real world of abundance, when like intelligence falls to zero, then yeah, it'd be great to embody that into robotics too.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

Yeah, I mean, for us, it's like...

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

I don't know, if you look at like basically any, in the US at least, any construction metric, so like labor productivity or adjusted CapEx numbers over the past like 50 years, we're getting worse.

The a16z Show
Designing the Physical World with AI

And I, you know, my past life, I come from the world of software where it's just like de facto everything gets better.