[AIEWF Preview] CloudChef: Your Robot Chef - Michellin-Star food at $12/hr (w/ Kitchen tour!)

**Swix** (0:04)
Okay, we are in the remote studio with a very special podcast. We actually recorded a while ago a tour of CloudChef's kitchen, but we wanted to record a little bit of an intro in our remote studio so that we at least get a nice audio podcast intro to the company. And we're here with my friend and co-host, Vibhu Sabra, and as well as Nikhil, who is the founder of CloudChef. Welcome, Nikhil.

**Nikhil Abraham** (0:28)
Thanks for having me, Swix.

**Swix** (0:31)
Okay, so yeah, welcome back, Vibhu. But I think by the time this launches, people will have heard the Anthropic podcast that we did. But yeah, so I think the headline that people will see when people see CloudChef is that it is an AI chef. You had this pretty viral video on Twitter recently, when you launched and told everybody. But also people don't know that this is a real restaurant. You actually run a real restaurant. You can order food on, I think Uber Eats.
Yeah, and it's really good. Yeah, so like, what is CloudChef? Like, what is the scope of it? How do you pitch the company?

**Nikhil Abraham** (1:02)
At a very high level, what we're trying to do is, we want to make high quality, nutritious food available to everyone. And the reason why it's possible to even think of a future like that is because you can automate practically all non-managerial work inside a commercial kitchen with culinary intelligent robots. And culinary intelligent robots is basically just robots that act like human beings, learn like human beings, and work like human beings or work like human chefs. So we actually have our first, the video that Sean was talking about is the launch video of our first robot. And basically, it's a robot that has a mobile base, has two hands, goes around and does work inside a kitchen. So it's just like how you would hire a human employee or a human chef, you would hire our robot and the robot will come to your facility, cook and come to your facility, learn recipes from the chefs inside the facility with one single demonstration and cook that dish over and over again, or participate in that workflow over and over again, like a human employee would. And then you pay the robot an hourly wage, like how you would pay a human. And so far, our robots are used by Michelin star chefs.
They're used by fresh fast food restaurants, airline caterers, a whole bunch of commercial facilities. Use our robots as hourly wage labor as compared to, as hourly wage labor as compared to buying a robot. The thing that makes our robot special is the fact that it can execute at chef level or the fact that it has culinary understanding better than even the best chefs in any single cuisine. Like what that means is, okay, if a robot is cooking, it needs to know how brown the onions are, how far along you are in the cooking process. If you're cooking in a slightly different appliance, what state is the recipe in, how much heat do you give it. All this thermodynamics modeling of cooking, understanding visually what's going on. This is what we call culinary intelligence and this is something that was not possible until like recently when like multimodal models got good enough and we basically built out some thermodynamics modeling to get that and now the end result of that is a robot that can reason and make decisions in the real world in cooking processes like a chef would.
Like more and more robot foundation models coming up then getting better. These robots are finally also able to do real actions or real motions inside a kitchen. Right now they're good enough to only do stuff like gross manipulation where you where you don't like if a human requires more than two fingers or three fingers to do a task the robots probably not able to do it but the good part is most tasks inside a kitchen can actually be done with just two fingers. So if you go around any commercial kitchen and if you have two fingers had enough strength you would probably do most tasks inside that kitchen. So we start with line cooking which is like the biggest labor cost for restaurants and restaurants and other food producing facilities. And our robot is able to do line cooking for about 40 to 50% of the world's commercially valuable cuisine to a point that if we put our robot against an expert chef in that cuisine our robot is able to consistently make the food better than even the chef whose source recipe it is. It's something that computers just do inherently much better than like the human brain. So that's a quick overview on this. Basically we've trained our in-house models to do thermodynamic perception and we leverage current VLMs and voice models to do perception and also to enable the robot to do tasks or for the robot to actually talk to human beings interact with other coworkers in the facility to course correct at schools and whatnot. So that's a quick overview on what we are. The high level goal, like I said, is to replace all non-managerial work inside commercial kitchens with culinary intelligent robots and when that plays out, we think we will all live in a future where we all have access to really high quality food at fast food price points. At McDonald's price points, you should be able to eat the tastiest food that you've ever had in your life. That's the thing that we want to create. And we think that now that the robots have started to work in the real world, we see a future in which we see a soon enough future in which we will make that possible. And to Sean's earlier point, we actually started experimenting with these robots in our own facilities. We basically just built an in-house delivery kitchen at our office in Palo Alto. We weren't expecting it to do this well. I mean, it just picked up really well on Tor Dash. And we had moved from, like me and my co-founder, we had moved from India to Palo Alto. And we were actually just missing really high quality Indian food here. So we just went to our favorite restaurants in Bombay and Delhi and asked them, can you record your recipes? We will serve them in California and we will give you a royalty. But that's not the core business that we're focusing on. It's just something that we use to validate our technology. And the fact that it's doing so well and the ratings are so good, that's just like the testament to how the tech is and how good the robot is functioning right now.