Why Is Robotics a Systems Problem, Not Just an AI Problem?

Josh Gruenstein tells Martin Casado and Raghu Raghuram that infinite robot intelligence still leaves the problem unsolved, because the robots still have to be manufactured at scale. Eight billion people already have the physical intelligence robots need. Software that could connect any person to any robot would be unlimited robot intelligence, and manufacturing in the United States would still be a cottage industry. Robots are a rounding error even in manufacturing and logistics, the software does not exist, and the customers do not exist, because the robots cannot do the jobs customers want done.

A working platform has to put intelligence, hardware, and the customer together. Forward progress comes from tradeoffs across the model, the hardware, the software, the supply chain, the customers, and the product. Dropping one layer eliminates 90 percent of the tradeoff space. No robot startup has been massively economically successful, because the field lacked intelligence as a core primitive that could bring unit economics to a workable level, and because the market is highly disaggregated.