The Operating System for Self Driving Cars (and Tanks, and Trucks...) With Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig of Applied Intuition

**Elad Gil** (0:05)
Qasar and Peter, thank you so much for joining me today on No Priors.

**Qasar Younis** (0:08)
Thanks for having us. I came as casual as I could for the San Francisco.

**Elad Gil** (0:12)
I was worried about you. You're usually a Biden Bob, you're wearing something nice. That's kind of, that's concerned. Is everything okay?

**Qasar Younis** (0:18)
Yeah, it is, it is. Two things. One is, I wanted to fit in with the San Francisco vibe, Sunnyvale. I usually dress more like Peter. Yeah. I think that's my outfit.
And then secondly, you know, I got this Carhartt thing. And I don't know if you guys know, Carhartt is suddenly cool. I got the memo from the Cool Club Newsline. It's a Detroit brand. If anybody doesn't know, we're representing Detroit and Silicon Valley. Wow, nice.

**Elad Gil** (0:44)
Very nice. Yeah, I just thought, I thought-

**Qasar Younis** (0:47)
You're not impressed.

**Peter Ludwig** (0:47)
It's okay.

**Elad Gil** (0:49)
I'm extremely impressed. I thought it was one of those things where, I think you guys just raised it, a $15 billion valuation. And so I thought it was more like kind of, you're done. You're just checked out now.

**Qasar Younis** (0:57)
No, no, no. So last night, we were having dinner with one of the top three global OEM CTOs. And he says, I can't reveal who it is only because it's active, active negotiations on a deal. And he says, well, congratulations on the fundraisers. How do you feel? And I said, well, honestly, I feel a little nervous.
We have big goals ahead of us. He said, don't be a coward.

**Elad Gil** (1:21)
Attack.

**Qasar Younis** (1:21)
And I was like, OK, I will send that message to my team. Don't be cowards. Attack.

**Elad Gil** (1:28)
I mean, I guess, in general, when I think about you all, so I've known you for over a decade.

**Qasar Younis** (1:32)
Yeah.

**Elad Gil** (1:33)
I think I've led two of your rounds. And I feel like you're the most successful, most quiet company in AI. You've you're now at over a thousand people. You're in the hundreds of millions of revenue. You've been profitable the whole time. So you haven't spent a dime, I think, of any of the money that you've ever raised, which is pretty insane.

**Qasar Younis** (1:48)
Unbelievable to me as well.

**Elad Gil** (1:49)
From a capital efficiency perspective.

**Peter Ludwig** (1:50)
We're trying to change that quiet part, by the way.

**Elad Gil** (1:52)
Yeah, we're here.

**Qasar Younis** (1:53)
We came up to San Francisco and wore a jean jacket.

**Elad Gil** (1:57)
Yeah, welcome.

**Qasar Younis** (1:57)
See, Mom?

**Elad Gil** (1:57)
Yeah, exactly. Could you tell people a little bit about more generally what you do? I know you have three lines of business around engineering, tooling, autonomy, and then sort of in-car related product. Could you kind of break down the origins of the company, how you got started, what you focus on and just kind of give a primer? Because I think, again, you've accomplished an enormous amount. There's still a lot ahead of you, but my gosh, you've done so much.

**Qasar Younis** (2:18)
I mean, by the way, this is directly for founders more than anything else. There's a huge value, especially when the company is young, not to be constantly out there. I'm sure there's downsides as well, like people don't know you and it's harder to recruit or whatever. That's never really been a huge issue for us, but the advantages you get is you can operate. You know, the moment you say we do X, there's an expectation you do X, even if X ends up being wrong. And so I think that it's like, you know, keep your identity small kind of view. And so, yeah, the company Applied Intuition is a $15 billion. We just raised $15 billion profitable AI company. And what we really do is we build vehicle intelligence. So it's a broad category of how do you take this, you know, all the positive things about AI that we're seeing in, you know, in LLMs and in chat, and you take them into the real world. So how do you put intelligence into cars and trucks and tanks and fighter jets?
And it's roughly as those three business lines. So we originally started with engineering tools in order to build and deploy that type of intelligence into vehicles and test it and validate it. Because unlike your laptop, these are safety critical systems.

**Elad Gil** (3:29)
This was initially stuff that was built, I think, for the self-driving world, right? You were doing simulation environments.

**Qasar Younis** (3:33)