Grant Harvey

Hello, and welcome humans to the Neuron AI Explained.

I am your host, Grant Harvey.

And today we're talking about a part of the AI race that gets a lot less attention than chatbots, but may end up mattering even more.

That's robotics.

Our guest today is Brian Gerke, CTO of Intrinsic, the robotic software company that began inside Alphabet and now sits inside Google, working closely with DeepMind and Gemini.

So today we're getting into physical AI, why robotics suddenly feels like it's accelerating, what Intrinsic is building, and...

whether this could be the Android layer for robotics.

So Brian, welcome to The Neuron.

Hey, Grant.

Thanks for having me.

Pleasure to be here.

Brian, yeah, it's great to have you.

Could you tell us a little bit about your background, how you became CTO of Intrinsic, and what Intrinsic does for people who don't know?

I guess what I would love to follow up on is when you are building tools for

robotics is that the same as you would build like a software like like program for any other type of software that you would create or is there something specific that you have to do to make it like actually work with the robot like with robots in the real world like that physical layer you're talking about yeah it's a great question that's one that in robotics we tend to take we take for granted that the answer is yes it's different and that it is in part because we think that we're special snowflakes and everything that we do requires special attention and we need special versions of everything not all of which is entirely true

That sounds like one of the most difficult software engineering challenges I can imagine.

Trying to deal with all of that sensor data and all of the different people who have to collaborate to make it work.

I mean, you're basically reverse engineering.

I mean, I know you don't do humanoid robots that intrinsic, right?

But your reverse engineering, you know, a layer of intelligence that can operate in the physical world, it's hard for me to fathom as someone who's never built with that stuff before.