Marc Raibert

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243 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2024 last heard Feb 2024

Marc Raibert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · 16 Feb 2024 podcast

In fact, when we started, although I had the experience of building things in the leg lab, both at CMU and at MIT, we weren't that sophisticated of an engineering thing compared to what Boston Dynamics is now. But it was our ambition to do that. And Sarkos was another robot company. So I always thought of us as being this much on the computing side and this much on the hardware side.

And they were like this. And then over the years, I think we achieved the same or better levels of engineering. Meanwhile, Sarkos got acquired and then they went through all kinds of changes and I don't know exactly what their current status is, but... So it took many years is part of the answer. I think you got to find people who love it.

In the early days, we paid a little less, so we only got people who were doing it because they really loved it. We also hired people who might not have professional degrees, people who were building bicycles and building kayaks. We have some people who come from that kind of the maker world, and that's really important. for the kind of work we do to have that be part of the mix.

People who repaired the cars or motorcycles or whatever in their garages when they were kids.

Talk about being happy. There used to be a time when I was doing the machine shop work myself, back in those JPL and Caltech days, when if I came home smelling like the machine shop, because it's an oily place, my wife would say, oh, you had a good day today. Because you could tell that that's where I'd been.

Oh, you know, at Boston Dynamics, it put us on the map. I remember interviewing some sales guy and he was from a company and he said, well, no one's ever heard of my company, but we have products, you know, really good products. You guys, everybody knows who you are, but you don't have any products at all, which was true. So it was, and you know, we thank YouTube for that.

YouTube came, we caught the YouTube wave and it had a huge impact on our company.

I really admire Elon as a technologist. I think that what he did with Tesla is just totally mind-boggling, that he could go from this totally niche area that less than 1% of anybody seemed to be interested to making it, so that essentially every car company in the world is trying to do what he's done. So you got to give it to him. Then look at SpaceX. He's basically replaced NASA, if you could.

That might be a little exaggeration, but not by much. So, you know, you got to admire the guy. And, you know, I wouldn't count him out for anything. You know, I don't think Optimus today is where Atlas is, for instance. I don't know. It's a little hard to compare him to the other companies. You know, I visited Figure. I think they're doing well and they have a good team.

I've visited Aptronic, and I think they have a good team and they're doing well. But Elon has a lot of resources. He has a lot of ambition. I'd like to take some credit for his ambition. I think if I read between the lines, it's hard not to think that him seeing what Atlas is doing is a little bit of an inspiration. I hope so.

I would love to host that. Now that I'm not at Boston Dynamics, I'm not officially connected. I am on the board, but I'm not officially connected. I would love to host a- Robot meetups? A robot meetup, yeah.

We have a bunch of different robots. We bought everything we could buy. So we have spots. I think we have a good size fleet of them. I don't know how many it is, but a good size fleet. We have a couple of animal robots. You know, Animal is a company founded by Marco Hutter, even though he's not that involved anymore, but we have a couple of those.

We have a bunch of arms like, you know, Frank is and... U.S. robotics. Because even though we have ambitions to build stuff, and we are starting to build stuff, day one, getting off the ground, we just bought stuff. I love this robot playground you've built. You can come over and take a look if you want.

it doesn't feel that much like, well, there's some areas that feel like a playground, but it's not like they're all frolic together.

I think that, um, I don't think about competition that much. I'm not a commercial guy. I think for the many years I was at Boston Dynamics, we didn't think about competition. We were just kind of doing our thing. It wasn't like there were products out there that we were competing with. Maybe there was some competition for DARPA products.

funding, which we got, you know, got a lot of, got very good at, at getting, but even there, uh, in, in a couple of cases where we might've competed, we ended up just being the robot provider. That is for the little dog program. You know, we, we just made the robots. We didn't participate as developers except for developing the robot. And in the DARPA robotics challenge, we didn't compete.

We, uh, provided the robots. So, uh, In the AI world now, now that we're working on cognitive stuff, it feels much more like a competition. The entry requirements in terms of computing hardware and the skills of the team and hiring talent, it's a much tougher place. So I think much more about competition now on the cognitive side.

On the physical side, it doesn't feel like it's that much about competition yet. Obviously, with 10 humanoid companies out there, 10 or 12, I mean, there's probably others that I don't know about, they're definitely in competition, will be in competition.

I think there's a huge way to go. I don't think we've seen the bottom of it or the bottom in terms of lower prices. I think you should be totally optimistic that at Asymptote, things don't have to be anything like as expensive as they are now. Back to competition, I wanted to say one thing.

I think in the quadruped space, having other people selling quadrupeds is a great thing for Boston Dynamics. Because the question, I believe the question in the user's minds is, which quadruped do I want? It's not, oh, do I want a quadruped? Can a quadruped do my job? It's much more like that, which is a great place for it to be. Then you're just doing quadrupeds.

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