#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Marc raibert, a legendary roboticist, founder, and longtime CEO of Boston Dynamics, and recently the executive director of the newly created Boston Dynamics AI Institute that focuses on research and the cutting edge, on creating future generations of robots that are far better than anything that exists today. He has been leading the creation of incredible legged robots for over 40 years at CMU, at MIT, the legendary MIT leg lab, and then of course Boston Dynamics with amazing robots like BigDog, Atlas, Spot, and Handle. This was a big honor and pleasure for me. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got HiddenLayer for securing your AI and machine learning models. Babbel for learning new languages. MasterClass for learning NetSuite for business management software. And ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the internet. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I tried to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, an amazing sponsor, called HiddenLayer. It's a platform that provides security for your machine learning models. If you've been paying any attention, it's obvious that generative AI, machine learning, AI in general, is going to transform basically every single industry. If you're starting a business, if you're running a business, there's probably a lot of ways that language models or any of these generative systems could be used to help automate certain things, to help empower certain things, improve certain things, all that kind of stuff, to work together with humans to improve the productivity. Now, what comes with great, powerful new technology is security threats. There's always bad guys out there and they want to find ways in adversarial attacks. They want to trick you. You need experts to help you incorporate the machine learning models that you're using in a secure way. That's what HiddenLayer does. I think that's really interesting because the kinds of attacks on machine learning models is going to be really, really interesting because one way to do that is if you look at a model zoo repository, like Hugging Face, for example, one way is to get a model in there that looks legit but has weirdnesses to it. They're hard to discover until they're actually way down the line being used at a large scale. So that's like one way to do it. The other way is to do outside repositories and deliver the models that look legit, but again, in subtle ways, difficult to detect ways. It will look legit first, it will look functional and correct at first, but then the kind of malware inside the machine will emerge down the line. So you want experts to be considering this rapidly evolving security threat that is laden within machine learning systems. Visit hiddenlayer.com/lex to learn more about HiddenLayer. These guys are great. They're great sponsors of this podcast. They do a really important service for the whole machine learning community. So check them out. This episode is brought to you by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks. Russian, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and more. I can keep going, but those are the ones I want to speak. German, Italian. I want to at least order stuff in Italian or a restaurant. And that's the kind of stuff you can learn with Babbel really quick. It's like practical conversational stuff. So when you're traveling, you can use it. Portuguese, obviously. You know, I practiced a martial art called Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Portuguese, Brazil. I got to do it. Spanish. Same thing. I'm a huge fan of soccer, aka football, and of course dream of one day interviewing some of these said soccer players and the other languages like Russian. We're going to try to do a bunch of different translation and overdubbing very, very soon, the various podcast conversations I've been doing. I think one of the most powerful way to bridge barriers between people is breaking through the wall that language creates. Automated translation. And then when you actually meet them in person to speak their language or to attempt to speak their language, that's what again, Babbel is great for. I use it. All the languages I mentioned, I've used it to learn that even to practice my Russian. For a limited time, get 50% off a one-time payment for a lifetime Babbel subscription at babbel.com/lexpod. That's 50% off at babbel.com/lexpod. Spelled babbel.com/lexpod.