Josh Wolfe: The ChatGPT of Robotics is Coming

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:20)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Tracy, let's talk about AI some more.

Tracy Alloway (0:29)

Okay. Well, we could just have AI write the script for us and save ourselves some time.

Joe Weisenthal (0:34)

No, I don't think the technology is there yet. You know what? So I can't say who, maybe. I was talking to a professor recently, and she said something really interesting to me. I'm not sure, it's fine.

And she said, there's all this anxiety about kids cheating on their essays or having ChatGPT write their essays for them.

And supposedly professors are tearing their hair out, trying to figure out what to do about this, and the AI detectors don't really work all that well, particularly. But apparently, it seems like the solution is to just grade them as regular essays no matter what. And it sounds like at this point, all the ChatGPT essays are basically solid C essays. And so if you just take them at face value, even if you think they might be AI generated, at least at this point, it doesn't seem like a way, at least for college students to write good essays yet.

Tracy Alloway (1:25)

So our baseline, our average is ChatGPT now.

Joe Weisenthal (1:30)

Yeah, that's basically, can you beat the bot?

Tracy Alloway (1:32)

Did you see the thing someone was tweeting about one of the tells for AI generated words is if you use the word delve?

Joe Weisenthal (1:40)

Yes, I saw that.

Tracy Alloway (1:41)

Which as someone who I'm sure has used delve numerous times on this podcast, and in my writing, I thought it was a little unfair.

Joe Weisenthal (1:48)

It is a little unfair.

Tracy Alloway (1:49)

It's a cliche, but that doesn't mean it's from AI.

Joe Weisenthal (1:52)

All that being said, there's more to AI than just ChatGPT obviously and chatbots. And this sort of has come up on a couple episodes recently, but only like very tangentially. People talk about the use of like AI and industrial applications. And I've seen a lot of stuff. There have been a couple of Bloomberg articles about some startups that sort of say like, okay, well like what if we trained robots the same way we trade large language models where you feed them just like tons and tons and tons of real world data. And so that, yeah, like you're sure you still have to solve the mechanical engineering part. But then what if that allows them like all this training data to do more advanced industrial things?

Like, I don't know, like make a pizza or be a more powerful humanless assembly line or something like that, where it's like, we see all these impressive robots in videos like Boston Dynamics, but I never know like, if any of this is like quite there yet in terms of having its value.

Tracy Alloway (2:49)

Yeah, so the robotics aspect of AI is something that's incredibly interesting to me. It kind of makes me think about the world that we want to see. So it would be great if we had physical robots who are able to do stuff like clean up a house or take care of an elderly family member or something like that.

It's not so great if all of our technological prowess basically goes into writing satirical lyrics via ChatGPT. That's fun. I can do that myself. But what I really need is someone to vacuum or dust the house.

Joe Weisenthal (3:23)

Do the laundry would be really nice. All right. Well, I just want to jump right into it because we really do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking to someone who has been investing in AI for a long time. A lot of VCs started investing in AI last year, obviously.

But this is someone who has been investing in AI for quite some time before it became the hot new thing. We spoke to him last July and had a great conversation about what he was seeing in the space. So I'm really pleased to welcome back on the show. We're going to be speaking with Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital.

Josh, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots.

Josh Wolfe (4:01)

Great to be on. I feel like I should say hello in like a robot voice.

Joe Weisenthal (4:06)

So what's interesting to you these days, what are you seeing out there that gets you excited?

Josh Wolfe (4:10)

Well, you know, you guys started this off with AI, and within AI, look, we've had what I would call maybe a little bit pejorative, a little bit lewd and crude. We've had chips, everybody knows that. We talked last time about in AMD. We've got chat bots. You already have some of these guys that are starting to fail. They've raised billions of dollars, and in some cases just relatively undifferentiated.