The AI Engineer Every Industrial Company Will Need | Paul Eremenko (P-1 AI) & Jeff Immelt (NEA)

**Paul Eremenko** (0:00)
If you want an AI to be a good aerospace engineer, it needs to see millions of airplanes. And there just haven't been millions of airplane design since the Wright brothers, right? It's like order hundreds to thousands, and they're not really readily available or accessible. Very little of the effort and the investment is going into building AI to help build that physical world and make that physical world better.

**Jeff Immelt** (0:17)
How do you avoid getting stuck in the proof of concept phase versus the commercialization phase? I have a nose for that.

**Anne Dwane** (0:33)
I'm Anne Dwane from Village Global, and today we're joined by Paul Eremenko, founder and CEO of P-1 AI, a company building AI engineers for the physical world. P-1's flagship product is Archie, an AI mechanical and electrical engineer that works alongside human engineers using the very same tools they do.
Think of Archie as a capable junior engineer that helps industrial companies move faster at a time when engineering talent is scarce and when there's enormous demand to build everything from factories to robots to energy infrastructure and data centers. It's an exciting moment for P-1 because their momentum has culminated in them raising a $50 million Series A led by NEA. But wait, there's more. Jeff Immelt, venture partner at NEA, is joining P-1 AI's board of directors, and he's here with us today. Before NEA, Jeff spent 16 years as chairman and CEO of GE, leading one of the world's largest industrial companies through a period of extraordinary technological and organizational transformation. Today, he serves on the boards of companies like Bloom Energy, Twilio, and NEA portfolio companies, including Desktop Metal, Formlabs, and Radiology Partners, and many more. Paul and Jeff bring two remarkably complimentary perspectives. One building the future of engineering with AI, and one who has spent a career leading and transforming engineering organizations at global scale. We're going to talk today about why mechanical and electrical engineering is ripe for AI leverage from Archie, what it takes to build trusted AI teammates, how to lead companies in the age of AI, and what's ahead for the next generation of industrial innovation.
Welcome both of you.

**Jeff Immelt** (2:13)
Thanks Anne. Delighted to be here.

**Anne Dwane** (2:15)
And Paul, let's start first with the name of the company. What is the origin of the name?

**Paul Eremenko** (2:21)
I'm so glad you asked. So there's a very much underappreciated piece of early AI sci-fi literature called The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas Ryan. And actually, I don't think a lot is known about Thomas Ryan. So we're not sure if it's a pseudonym or if somebody who actually wrote the book or who's behind that. But, and he never seemed to have written anything else. But this book came out in the 70s and is one of the earliest depictions of AI really gaining sentience. And it doesn't go well in the book. I don't want to spoil it. It's certainly an homage to early sci-fi literature, which I think has inspired a lot of the leaders of the AI field today.
But also a bit of a cautionary tale that we certainly keep in mind as we build our product and company.

**Anne Dwane** (3:06)
Great. Well, and it sounds like some of the seeds of P-1 were actually sown back when you were at Darpa and that you were thinking about Joint Strike Fighter and other complex projects. So can you tell a little bit about that era and maybe the Genesis?

**Paul Eremenko** (3:23)
Yeah, absolutely.
I would actually say that the seeds of the company were sown much earlier and have their roots in hard sci-fi, right? When AI comes, the first impact of AI is supposed to be on helping us build the built world, right? We are still physical creatures, for better or worse. The biggest part of the human experience is the physical world around us, but very little of the effort, certainly going into the early days of this current wave of AI in the early 2020s, but even still today, very little of the effort and the investment is going into building AI to help build that physical world and make that physical world better. So I think the early seeds lie there. But to your question about Darpa, yeah, you're absolutely right. So I went to Darpa in 2008, kind of 2012 timeframe, and this was right on the heels of the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35, being fielded. And the F-35 is the most expensive thing that human civilization has ever built with or without taking inflation into account, doesn't matter.
And it has the biggest cost variance since, you might argue, since the Gothic Cathedral. So here it may come in.