Friday Wrap-Up: The Humanoid Robotics Race and What You Should Be Reading

Marthe Skaar (0:00)

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to our Friday wrap up. I'm still Marthe Skaar.

Nicolai Tangen (0:05)

And I'm still Nicolai Tangen.

Marthe Skaar (0:06)

And today we're in the same room, same time zone, so that's a good starting point for this podcast. And we will start about chips and the value chains. So I guess it's going to be all about chips today.

This week's guest was Kai Yu. He's founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics. And let's start with the basic. Where does Horizon actually sit in the value chain when it comes to ships and self-driving cars?

Nicolai Tangen (0:45)

Well, it's instrumental in the self-driving cars business because basically they supply the systems and the chips behind a very, very large proportion of these self-driving cars. And so it's one of these cool, relatively small companies, which not so many people know about, but which is totally key.

And they have vast market share, both amongst the Chinese producers and also the Europeans. So they are really in the forefront here. Very, very exciting.

Marthe Skaar (1:16)

And you also opened the episode by saying that 10 years ago, you assumed that self-driving cars would come out of Silicon Valley. And you have just been to Silicon Valley and you have talked to a lot of these Chinese car producers.

What do you think about this now?

Nicolai Tangen (1:30)

No, I think it's really interesting because here, you know, we thought that perhaps Tesla would win this race. Then you are in San Francisco and you drive the Waymo's and you just see that experience and how good it is. Of course, first time you are inside one of these cars, it's a bit scary. But the second trip, it's the most natural thing in the world. And the third trip you take with a taxi, you wonder why the heck there is a chauffeur there, you know? So this is changing very fast. It's coming into more cities, it's coming to London, and eventually it will come to Scandinavia, even though it's a bit difficult because of snow conditions and so on. And so you just need to learn a bit more about it. But this is going to take over the whole taxi industry, I think.

Then eventually you'll change further, and so now you have hands-off coming up soon, you have eyes-off, and then eventually you have mind-off, which means that you can sleep in the car and just kind of program, hey, I want to go from A to B, and you wake up in the other end, and my, is that going to be great?

Marthe Skaar (2:35)

Would you sit in a car like that or sleep in a car like that?

Nicolai Tangen (2:38)

Totally. I think it's much safer than being in a normal car. And just imagine what you can spend your time doing. You can read books, you can do all kinds of things.

So great progress.

Marthe Skaar (2:48)

Yeah, so it's all about freeing up time.

Nicolai Tangen (2:50)

And we never really think about these technology shifts. You know, now you take the elevator, it's the most natural thing in the world not to have an operator in the elevator, but at some stage you had a driver in each elevator and they did it for you.

Then what happened was that you had the technology for a long period of time. You had a big strike, I think it was in the 40s, 30s, 40s. And given that strike, they just decided to kick them all out. And that was the end of drivers in the elevators. And now, you know, we do it ourselves. I think in 20 years time, you're just going to wonder why we were sitting there and turning that wheel ourselves.

Marthe Skaar (3:28)

Yeah, some car enthusiasts might disagree. But other than that, yeah. OK, and talking of that, because he says that he will, some of these companies we talked to, they will both like design the ship and produce the car. But he says that he would never build a car. So he wants to be the Microsoft and Intel for robots with Horizon inside.

What do you make of that choice?

Nicolai Tangen (3:55)

No, I think that's, well, that's his choice. Some people are want to be virtually integrated and do everything. Some people want to be specializing in what they do. You can see why they want to specialize because you need to a lot of training data to get these chips, you know, to do the right work and function in the right way. And so perhaps that's a job enough in itself, you know.