Steve. Yeah, good to see you, too.
Thanks for doing this. I was pretty excited when they reached out and said, 'Would you guys be interested in chatting about autonomy?'
Yeah. You love chatting about autonomy.
Yeah. And I love sitting in the 101 traffic while making notes on what we're going to talk about.
The traffic that almost made one of us late this morning. Yeah. Well, let's, I mean, we're pretty close to your roots here in the valley. So, I thought maybe what we could do is kick off and if you could tell, like, you know, how you got started, the origin story of Nuro and you and your co-founder.
Yeah. Well, it depends sort of how far back you want to go. I did my undergrad in New Zealand and then I came over to the US to Carnegie Mellon to do a PhD at the Robotics Institute, which was and still is basically the Disneyland for robotics nerds. And so while there I got hooked on basically every robot I could get my hands on. And towards the end of my PhD I participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge. So these were these races, these autonomous vehicle races that the defense department held. And in 2007 Carnegie Mellon won the urban challenge, which was basically driving in suburban urban areas. And from that point on I've been pretty hooked in autonomy. I was part of the Google self-driving car project before it became Waymo and that's where I met my co-founder, Jiajun Zhu, the JZ we call him. And then in 2016, the two of us left to start Nuro.
And when we started Nuro, the goal was really, we looked back on the last 20 or 30 years and we felt like we had all experienced this tremendous revolution in how we interact in the digital world. Things are completely different. We had the internet now. Subsequently over the last 5 years, it's revolutionized again. But when we looked at the physical world, we didn't see a corresponding transformation. And we felt like the way that we all exist and live in the physical world is not that different from how it was 50 years ago, even a hundred years ago in some cases. And we believe pretty strongly that that is going to change and was going to change over the next few decades. And we wanted to create a company in the physical AI space and the robotic space that would help bring about some of the really positive potential benefits of that technology and the transformation that that would have. So we created Nuro. The mission of the company was to better everyday life through robotics. And when we started out, we thought very hard about what the first application should be. We knew we wanted to build generalized intelligence and ideally superhuman intelligence that could be applied in the physical world, but we also knew we had to have a really concrete good first application that we could go after, something real and something very worthy for us to dedicate the team to. And so for the last 10 years, we've been working on self-driving, fully autonomous vehicles. Initially, it was in the scope of goods delivery. So we thought if we focused on vehicles that didn't transport people, we could build very defensive, very conservative drivers and really focus on safety. Over time, because the system we had built was fully based on AI, it learned how to drive based on all of the training data that had been given and all of the training data it had been given was expert human drivers. So we ended up learning how to drive like an expert human driver. And so we realized this technology is much more generalizable than just for goods delivery. And so a few years ago we expanded to passenger delivery logistics in both the commercial setting and in the personally owned vehicle front.
You started out, and I remember this vehicle. It was the first sort of scale commercially ready robot that was just purpose-built to drive on roads. Right. And you've told me this before, but it's you sort of you built it and you looked at it and you and your co-founder looked at it and said we need to take this technology and make it available to every vehicle manufacturer for every use case that's possible. That journey happened in parallel while computer vision, a lot of the machine learning, a lot of the data training that was necessary, the collection and the labeling and the training on real world roads was happening. Today, how do you look at your business today because there's Tesla out there, you know, it's personally owned vehicles that, you know, are moving from ADAS to full self-driving, level four is what we call it. And then you have Waymo which is a robo taxi network, again somewhat full stack, they don't make the car but they're not a personally owned vehicle company, right. And so those are the two options today and in China there's a few other options as well. So there's not many level four, true level four companies out there. What is Nuro's approach to this and what are they offering?
Yeah. So maybe to draw, we've talked a little bit about the digital AI side and the physical AI. Maybe to draw an analogy from the digital side today. If you look at the digital AI ecosystem, you have a few layers. The base layer you have the compute and you can sort of throw in data centers. So the power and the compute that is powering all of the AI. Then you have this foundational model layer and this is like the Anthropics, the Open AIs, the Geminis of the space that's building the core foundational AI technology that's generalizable. And then above that you have the application layer. So folks that are building specific applications of that AI like legal agents or customer service agents and so on. Where Nuro is playing in the mobility space is at that foundational model layer. So we have the compute providers, we have the hardware providers and then we have this sort of core generalizable, very very capable general AI that can do the driving and then on top of that we have a number of applications and those can be again like logistics vehicles, robo taxis, personally owned vehicles and the partners that we are working with, we are trying to help enable to build the entire application across the whole ecosystem. And so you mentioned Tesla and Waymo. So Tesla again they have this direct to consumer building the vehicles. Waymo is doing the robo taxis. We are trying to build a Nuro driver ourselves to really focus on what we do best which we believe is all the autonomy and then we are partnering with others to build out the entire product. So for instance we are launching a robo taxi this year with Lucid and Uber. Lucid will be manufacturing the vehicles. So they will roll off the production line with all of the hardware required to be able to be fully L4 autonomous. Uber is owning and operating the fleet. And so Nuro is purely providing the driver part. So every mile that the vehicles drive, it'll be the Nuro driver driving it. And we feel like that's a really good place for us to play because we can, as I mentioned, focus on what we think we can do best-in-class, which is the autonomy piece, and work with partners to do what they do best in class.
This is hardware, software, the models. And these are your own proprietary models. And so, you've trained them over the last 10 years. And this whole system to me feels like an operating system because you're working with hardware car OEMs, automakers, and then you're working with service providers, right? Like wireless carriers. There are the Ubers and the logistics networks of the world. In this technology operating system role that you guys are playing, what are some of the challenges? Because right now automakers are in trouble. I had lunch with a well-known automaker CEO, lunch meeting and you know they don't really have many options. They don't have a true autonomy team internally. Cruise failed out of GM. So there's been a little bit of disruption happening and a little bit of a slowdown to be honest, right? That was unexpected. So are you a partner to the OEMs? Are you a partner to the ride sharing networks? Are you partnered to both? Like how do you sort of navigate that?
Yeah. So we see ourselves very much as a partner to both. So I mentioned on the robo taxi side there's obviously a very close relationship with the mobility service provider. So Uber. On the personally owned vehicle side we want to empower OEMs to be able to provide full self-driving capabilities to all of their customers. And that may be a range from L2 plus which is driver assistance all the way through to L4 fully driverless. But Nuro wants to provide that foundational driving technology that can enable them to build out all of these future products and frankly to compete with the Teslas of the world who are doing a really really good job on the driver assistant side. And so other OEMs feel quite far behind most of them and they're looking for ways that they can provide a product that is as good, that is competitive with FSD but also in a way where they're not giving up a massive part of the future of their company, right? Like the OEMs don't really want to just be producing metal. They understand where everything is going. They generally understand that we're going to have more and more intelligent vehicles. The intelligence in our vehicles is going to be a more and more critical component of the vehicles and the purchase decision. And so they want to make sure that they have a piece of that and that they're not locked out. And we think that by working with Nuro, we can provide for them the ability to have this incredible best-in-class product but still have some of the control and access to the technology and more control over their future.
So, I mean, does this mean that in the future like I can have like my favorite Toyota or Mercedes with Nuro technology and I'll be able to have it as a personally owned vehicle and have self-driving and answer emails while we're on the 101 next time. Yeah. And then but then also I'll be able to have a variety of cars on these robo taxi networks like Uber.
Absolutely. So the future that we see is one in which mobility services will have fleets of dedicated robo taxi vehicles that are either managed by the mobility service or fleet operators more likely. And then there will also be just like there is today there will be a pretty significant number of personally owned vehicles that are also fully autonomous. And those vehicles can go operate on Uber network or Lyft or others when they're not being used by their owners. And that model, the interesting thing is that right now we're in this transition stage where mobility services overall are recognizing in order to leverage fully driverless vehicles today, someone needs to own a fleet and to operate it. That is actually a deviation from how mobility services generally operate. You know, generally they're very asset light. They don't own vehicles. They leverage people that own their own vehicles and it's a very good model. We're having to take this transition step where someone maybe the mobility service provider themselves is now owning big fleets of these vehicles, but that is a step towards a future where it's going to be more similar to today where there are personally owned vehicles again that can be leveraged by the mobility service. And so it becomes asset light again. And so you've sort of got this step in the middle, but I do believe that there will always be some fleets that are owned and operated that are dedicated.
I was an early investor in Uber and I would say that like textbook, like on paper it sounds like there would be an ecosystem of venture-backed fleets that would grab Nuro's technology and then there are a bunch of companies obviously on the Uber network but I think it's important for all these ride sharing networks, logistics networks, delivery platforms to actually forge their own path and instigate it and make it happen.
Yeah. Physical AI obviously with atoms takes a long time, right? It's not software. It's not a software roll out. But I think for it to work, it needs to be sort of driven by the network that stands to control all the customers and all the customer accounts, right? And so, you know, in along that vein, I mean, you have logistics out there, right? And clearly like all these trucks that are delivering packages at random times in front of our homes and offices.
Yeah. That should be autonomous. So we're venturing into robo taxi networks. You'll be on the road later this year actually out here in Redwood City.
You'll be available on the Uber app as the Uber Nuro offering which is really cool. But tell us about like delivery logistics, all of these packages and parcels floating around. What is it, is it the same? Is it just rolling it out into vehicles or is there a fleet command?
Yeah, I think more broadly we have something like two billion vehicles in the world today. Two billion vehicles and obviously today...
And how many of those are EVs by the way?
