Rich Robinson:

And we're back. Well, actually we're not back. We're here at the inaugural Intercognitive Foundation Podcast. My name is Rich Robinson. I am founding chairman, proud founding chairman of the Intercognitive Foundation, which was established with the mission and vision to make the physical world accessible to AI. And ladies and germs, boys and girls, I was silver-pilled by the gentleman across from me, the co-founder and CEO of Auki Labs, Nils Pihl everybody, put your hands together. I don't care if you're driving or you're in a bathroom stall, and it's kind of weird. I just want a round of applause for this guy. Thank you very much. Excellent. Thank you, Jamie.

Are we on the Rogan show? This is a seven-hour podcast with Nils and we're going into it. Thank you so much. We're here in my hometown, the warm embrace of Mother Ubud on the island of the gods. Nils is visiting with his family after being all over the multiverse, getting a mini shampoo collection, shouting from the rooftops about Auki and his mission and vision.

I would love for our listeners to hear a little bit of a background, some stories and anecdotes from you growing up in the Nordics and then your path to China where we first met. Now, you're based in Hong Kong and then we'll lead up to what you're doing right now and Intercognitive Foundation and the future. But let's rewind back to the origin story when you were bitten by a radioactive robot back in the day.

Nils:

So I was born in '86 to software entrepreneur parents, which was a lucky hand of cards to get dealt for sure. As a result, I grew up on the internet. And the internet was a very interesting place back then because people didn't know how to use it yet. Your typical parents didn't know how to teach you how to get on. So, the internet was a very cool place full of very pioneering people that had figured it out on their own. You know, this is before my grandma got a Facebook account, right? And I spent so much time online that by my mid-teens or so, my English was better than my Swedish, which my mom thought was silly. We had a lot of arguments about being social and I...

kept telling her like, "You don't understand just how social I am, you know, having multiple conversations at the same time with people all over the world." I remember, actually, I remember 9-11, as soon as it happens, I can go online and I talked to my friends who are in New York and you're seeing it out their windows and feeling that this is the ground floor of the metaverse, right? Like there's people here whose existence is online, their emotions are online. I know them by their usernames. That's how they identify. And information is propagating in real time and emotions are propagating in real time. and I just realized I really want to be a part of building the metaverse, if you will. And I came to the conclusion that what the metaverse is, is if anything a state of mind, right? The metaverse is when you embrace your digital identity. It's a suspension of disbelief. It's when you are in the metaverse, when you are that online persona and you fully accept your online friends as real, et cetera. Maybe it seems mundane now, but it shouldn't be. Like this is still a very new thing for humanity. I gave a talk a couple of years ago about kind of the shamanic progression of technology, where, you know, if you go far enough back, we lived in an oral tradition, right? And what's interesting with oral traditions is any piece of information that we want to retain, we have to keep it alive in conversation. If you're the last person that knows how to make a spear and you die, then spear making is lost. So oral traditions require a lot of attention and care to keep information.

Yes. Right. And you have to be intentional with your storytelling to be able to retain a knowledge base for your tribe. Right. And then writing was invented, which allowed us to persist memes over time. Super big, super, super big, and allowed us a new mode of consciousness. Reading. Right. It's like a new human being. And after that, we get the printing press and the printing press allows this like mass propagation of memes like never before and now you can build up group consciousness in a way that you couldn't. And then you know we get the telephone. And the telephone, I think is underappreciated for its cyberdelic impact because the telephone was the first time that you could have a moment of togetherness at a distance. Right? So what do I mean by togetherness? You know, in talking about the metaverse. I think a lot of people intuitively think that, being together with someone is like this physical thing, but everyone has felt alone in a classroom or at a party. Right? So it can't be that togetherness is a function of proximity to people. And growing up online, I realized that you can feel togetherness with people at

Rich Robinson:

At 9-11 you felt like you were right there talking to established contacts and seeing 9-11 through their eyes in New York. You know, it's fascinating.

Nils:

It was interesting to have an emotional, I wouldn't say I was right there, obviously... stolen valor, but it was interesting to get to feel with them.

Rich Robinson:

Sure. And that kind of that took you there in a way that reading about it on the news or just, you know, hearing about it secondhand, you know, there really is a connection there that I think I'd like to pull on those threads a little more. By the way, tell your mom that whatever kind of social stuff you were doing, it worked because your storytelling ability and your ability to plant a meme inside somebody else's head really works. And I know because you unscrewed the top of my skull and then took a tiller to my brain and then planted a whole bunch of seeds and now they're coming out of my ears.

Nils:

Well, I think Beijing back when we first met, was a lot like the internet that I grew up on. In that, you know, growing up online in the late '90s, early 2000s, people were always being like, "Hey, don't you want to go outside? Don't you miss the blue skies? Shouldn't you be doing something else with your like, "No. I want to be here with all of these other pioneering people that have found their way here somehow. And that's what I fell in love with Beijing. Like Beijing is full of people that are not Beijingers, right? They're from all over China. They're from all over the world. And everyone's made it there for some reason and want to be part of something. And you will hear the same kind of haters, "Don't you miss the blue skies?" It's like, "This is it. Beijing felt like the early internet.

Before my grandma got her Facebook account."

Rich Robinson:

That's great, and you were in Beijing from when to when

Nils:

From 2009 to 2017.

Rich Robinson:

Yes, that was a really golden, golden, golden era that I think in the expanse of Chinese history, the 5,000 years, that little window from like, I would say 99 to 2019, 2020. Like that was a very magical era. It was a catch basin for people who were self-selecting. And it wasn't just China because Beijing is tougher. Beijing was barely fit for human habitation in some ways with the pollution and the weather and the sandstorms and the traffic. And I love Beijing, but I don't like it sometimes because of those challenges, but I wasn't leaving and I stayed there 20 years myself. So I'd never thought about that, that there really was this parallel between the internet and very, very pioneering. And what took you there and what kept you

Nils:

So in my early 20s, I took a sabbatical. I thought I was writing a book. Turns out I was not. But I took a sabbatical to write a book. And my girlfriend at the time was a long distance relationship, American born Chinese, had never been to China. And she said, "I want to go do a semester abroad."

I was like, "Well, I'm not doing anything. I'll tag along."

I was in love with Beijing already on the cab ride from the airport. Yes. Right. Yes. I was. I mean, I was so excited to see all the construction that was going on. It was fun trying to, you know, learn some Chinese just by reading the road signs. And it just felt very much like a great computer game and a great adventure that I wanted to be part of.

Rich Robinson:

If you you know, know

Nils:

And long story short. She did not stay in Beijing, but I did, right? I ended up staying seven years.

Rich Robinson:

It is not for the faint-hearted, that's for sure.

Nils:

I could, So I have this pet peeve with the with the Western psyche. I think My generation was brought up to believe that we live in post-history. Like history is done. Like after the fall of the Berlin wall, we now live in the established world order in post-history. And it was very clear to me when I, got to Beijing that all of that was a lie. History's still on, like it's happening. You can still do great things. People are going to do great things. And as an avid strategy gamer, you know, I could tell that like, the turn-based science output here is very, it's very great. If I stay here for 10 years, I will have seen China go from, you know, arguably a third world country to the world's leading superpower. And yeah, over the last 20 years, they've just gone through this amazing transformation. And I think just the last five years in particular have just, or since COVID just mind blowing, even living in Hong Kong, kind of feel a little bit like that, that frog getting boiled, you know, you don't notice how much it's developed until you leave. When you go back to Europe, when you go back to America and you're like, "Oh wow! The rest of the world has not moved at this pace."

There's something really astonishing happening in China right now. And of course, part of what's coming out of that is now the robotics scene. This amazing plethora of robotics companies that are building very openly, making programmable robots, they're collaborating with each other and...

just accelerating the timeline of civilization.

Rich Robinson:

There's that word "civilization." That's what you used. There's so few people that use the 'civilization' in business or normal conversation outside of gaming. And that's something that I've heard you use a number of times. And I remember hiking with you in Hong Kong and you talked to me about this robot revolution and where it's going in the future on a civilizational scale and I just couldn't help but "Take this blue pill and go back to your b*llsh*t regular life. Take the silver pill and come with me, Rich, into the future."

Nils:

I think there are a couple of civilization scale things that are happening now. Almost like unstoppable winds that as long as we can, you know, hold on to civilization, we'll see some pretty. Things are going to change pretty, pretty.

Rich Robinson:

Civilization can change, yes. End End of history, maybe not. End of civilization, hopefully not.

Nils:

I think one of the civilization scale things that I got hooked on was this concept of decentralized infrastructure, which is really a business model innovation. Our good friend Mike, Mike Horton, GEODNET

Rich Robinson:

Mike Horton of GEODNET

Nils:

is I think one of the best examples of what is decentralized infrastructure and why is it so powerful. So a lot of things that we need in the modern world requires infrastructure. Wi-Fi needs Wi-Fi infrastructure, cellular needs cellular infrastructure, running water, all of these things. There's a lot of infrastructure that we need. And typically, historically, it has either been the state that puts down the infrastructure or some corporation that puts down the infrastructure. And they have to own the capital expenditure. They have to own the strategy and the planning. But people like Mike have demonstrated that you can leave infrastructure buildout to the original artificial intelligence, The Free Market. So the free market.

Rich Robinson:

.

Nils:

has amazing emergent intelligence capability.

Rich Robinson:

I never thought of the invisible hand of Adam Smith as artificial intelligence, but it certainly is.

Nils:

Yeah, that's our first AI. This, or maybe our second depending on how you view the big memeplexes like monotheistic religions. But it's a very powerful AI: the free market and the idea was that, "Okay, so in GEODNET's case they put out something called RTK base stations. RTK is a piece of hardware, it stands for real-time kinematics, that allows you to get better accuracy from the GPS. So typically, the GPS is a line-of-sight technology. It typically only gives you a few meters of accuracy. It's not good enough for something like an autonomous combine harvester or any kind of agricultural machinery where you want to be able to know that you're going in a straight line, you want to know where you've planted the plants, you want to get that down to centimeter accuracy. And you can't get that from the GPS in the sky, but with RTK you can. You put base stations out in the world. There you go, right? And you trilaterate against those and get...

Rich Robinson:

I have one on my roof here in Newport, yes. And instead of plus or minus 20, 30 meters, it's plus or minus 2, 3 centimeters, which is extraordinary, right? Orders of magnitude, right?

Nils:

amazing. And what Mike did was tell The Free Market, "Look, I'm going to put out a map and show you where we have coverage. I am going to let you buy this infrastructure and you can place it. And if you place it somewhere where people end up using it, I'll share the revenue with you." So that means that he shares the capex with the free market. He shares the analysis of where the nodes need to go with the free market. And he also shares the upside with the free market. And long story short, he has built the world's largest RTK network. And this business model is often called "DePIN" — Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. There are a couple of really amazing DePINs not just GEODNET but also things like Helium is a very interesting DePIN that helps give cell phone coverage indoors. So I have friends in San Francisco that just as a hobby go visit different restaurants and put a Helium base station there so that there's proper coverage inside and make good money on making sure that there's coverage in all of these indoor spaces. And what we're building at Auki is also a decentralized infrastructure. We're related to what Mike is doing with GEODNET. We're working on how machines understand the physical world, how they do positioning, and how they interpret their sensor data to make sense of the world around them collaboratively. And the reason I fell into that particular rabbit hole was in 2019, I just lost my job and I was going to do something fun, I thought. I got into Warhammer, the tabletop game, and...

Rich Robinson:

slippery slope that's a that's all consuming

Nils:

And I got super fascinated with the company that makes Warhammer Games Workshop. And I thought, "I'd like to go work at Games Workshop, but I'm not going to go apply like a schmuck. I'm going to build something and sell them so I can go work there." So I spent the summer thinking about: "What can I build and sell to Games Workshop?" And I decided I am going to make augmented reality overlays so that people can

Rich Robinson:

I know this story. Excellent.

Nils:

do measurements through terrain. They can see, you know, which things are inside the range of their aura, but also make it so that you can have a proper e-sports viewing experience for the two million people or so that were watching Warhammer games online during COVID, right? It's like, "I'll do that. I'll sell that to them." Didn't know anything about augmented reality, right? So I immediately had the cold shower that I think people are increasingly having when they...

get into things like robotics, that the GPS is just not going to cut it, right? I needed to build shared augmented reality experiences where we would see the same thing in the same place at the same time, which means technically you need to make sure that your device and my device are in agreement on a coordinate system down to centimeter accuracy and they don't have that out of the box, right? So outdoors you can use things like RTK. RTK is also a line-of-sight, actually. But indoors, we couldn't use RTK in here for shared augmented reality. So you need different kinds of positioning for different kinds of scenarios. And it seemed clear that what was going to win indoor positioning is visual positioning, meaning that you compare what the camera is seeing to a previous model of the world and compute, "Well, if this is what you're seeing, this must be your precise location." That works comparatively well, but the issue is whenever you do a comparison like that, both data sets have to be in the same place. So either I'm going to be sending my model of the world down to your future AR glasses or down to your robot and these models of the world are big, so it's not super practical. You have to wait for long, long downloads to be able to figure out where you are.

Rich Robinson:

Or...

Nils:

You send what you're looking at to someone's cloud somewhere. And that is what happens in 99.99 % of cases. And I realized that was a massively bad thing for our civil liberties, our cognitive freedom. It would be very bad for literally all of our future AR glasses to be streaming at all times to some central entity somewhere that knows what we're looking at because that's required for them to work, right? So I wanted to build a DePIN for visual positioning where you could, instead of building one big map of the world that everyone streams to. You allow any venue to self-host something that describes their venue. Kind of like how the internet is not just one big cloud somewhere. It's a lot of people's different web servers, et cetera. And that's what makes the internet great and resilient and free. And the physical internet needs to work the same way. In fact, I believe that the internet needs to grow into three new dimensions to be ready for the physical AI era.

Rich Robinson:

Hmm.

Nils:

We need an internet of spaces, which is what we started building, right? Machines need to be able to browse and search and navigate physical spaces that they haven't been to before. So this is an internet of spaces where you can connect to a local venue and ask where the bathroom is and not have to go look for it. You want your humanoid robot to be able to go to Walmart and find the ketchup without having to look through all of Walmart to find the ketchup. The Walmart AI should be able to answer your humanoid, "Here's where the ketchup is." So that's an internet of spaces. But you probably also need, almost certainly, an internet of sensors, because physical AI is not going to be very efficient if it's tied to just a single embodiment. They can do a lot more if they can borrow the sensor information from other devices around them. My favorite example of this is a Beijing story for scale. For those of you that don't know, know this, course, Beijing is a very big city. In fact, it's so big that there are more cars on the road in Beijing than there are people in Los Angeles. And the average commute by car is something like two hours. So if you do the quick back of the napkin calculation, you find that roughly the time it took to build the pyramids is lost in Beijing traffic every single week. Now we can imagine a world where all the cars are self-driving and they are coordinating with each other and they don't have to stop for red lights and we get some good fraction of a pyramid worth of human productivity back every single week.

Rich Robinson:

Nils:

That can only happen if the cars can coordinate with each other. If they can do things like ask, "Hey, you just went around this corner. May I ask you, is there any reason for me to slow down?" They need to be able to communicate with each other about where they are precisely in space, how fast they are moving down to the centimeter, all of these things. Tricky, tricky stuff to build, but the economic incentive is just so huge, right? There are...

pyramids worth of human productivity to get back just in Beijing. So an internet of spaces, an internet of sensors, and then the third dimension is an internet of actuators, the ability for physical AI to borrow robots around them to solve different tasks. You can think of it as teleoperation but for robots teleoperating other robots, if you will.

Rich Robinson:

Thank you.

Nils:

Why shouldn't your physical AI be able to sign into a robot in New York, go shopping for you for some physical item, go drop that off in the mail, and then sign out of that robot? Why not?

Rich Robinson:

Fascinating. I think right now with agentic AI, people are building agents to sell to other agents, not even to sell to other humans. So yes, of course, that generative AI that we're in now is going to agentic AI and then that's going to go to embodied AI and then robots will be controlling or living through other robots. Wow. Mind blown. Once again, thank you.

Nils:

There's a big conversation in robotics right now about something called cross-embodiment, which is an, you know, open challenge. And how do you get any kind of physical AI to be good at inhabiting different kinds of bodies, you know? Can you have one AI that is just as comfortable living inside a dog robot as living inside a humanoid robot? This is the cross-embodiment problem. But I think an underappreciated problem that I just wrote about recently is "co-embodiment." The idea that you should be able to have many different AIs inhabit the same robot body and come and go, not as they please, but be able to be temporary guests inside any kind of robot body. Because, well, I have some friends who make glasses. They make smart glasses. They just launched about a month ago and like me they are big believers that glasses are going to be just as popular as smartphones within a couple of years because it's the best way for you to work very closely with AI right with glasses you can let AI see what you see, hear what you hear, just have the full context of what it is you're doing and it can be proactive and and just turn you into a superhuman I fully believe that I'm glasses-pilled right but what these guys realized, they're called, "MENTRA," is that, they're big competitors, like Meta, who's making the Ray-Bans, are all trying to build one AI for the glasses, and you just have to deal with that one AI. But that's not how your phone works, that's not how your computer works. There's an app store that lets you choose between different capabilities. And that's good because different intelligence providers are good at different things. Like anyone that works a lot with AI realizes this, you know Claude is good at this, ChatGPT is good at this, et cetera. So they embraced co-embodiment for the glasses and made an operating system for the glasses that allows multiple apps and multiple AIs to have shared access to the camera, shared access to the microphone.

Shared access to the context of the world. Because essentially, if you're wearing the glasses and you're in Shenzhen and you're negotiating, you want your note taker to be able to listen to the conversation. You want your translation AI to be able to listen to the conversation. You want your personal assistant AI to be able to listen to the conversation. All of these different sub-functions need shared access. And I think they actually stumbled on something that's going to be very important for robotics, co-embodiment.

Rich Robinson:

Wow, Tank, I need to learn how to fly a Blackhawk. Let's go. I know Kung Fu. Like, I can imagine what the different co-embodiment agents could be like, or AIs. Like, can you give an example of like one or two?

Nils:

Yeah, so at Auki this year, we're going to be deploying wheeled humanoids into retail environments, but not to actually manipulate anything. Actually, if I can take two steps back, right, you could say that robots have roughly three capabilities if we simplify the world. Yeah, so they have the ability

Rich Robinson:

Let's simplify.

Nils:

to do locomotion, which is to traverse an environment. There's manipulation, which means to affect change on the environment. And then there's perception, to make observations about the environment. And modern robotics, of course, combines all of these capabilities to make increasingly more capable robots. But interestingly, you can say that the kind of jobs that a robot could do in the world roughly map to these same three buckets, right? So there are locomotion tasks, like a Tesla self-driving car is a locomotion robot. Like sure, it does perception, it has to, but it does it in order to solve a locomotion job, right? Weave makes a laundry folding robot and it uses perception, of course, but it does so in order to perform a manipulation task. And I submit to you that there are also just full-on perception tasks where maybe you'll have to use some locomotion to perform it well. But the point is to go observe the world. And one of my recent favorite examples is my friend Jonathan Moon at Budbreak. They make robots for vineyards. And when I say that, most people will jump to the conclusion like, this robot is going to either be harvesting or pruning or spraying, doing some manipulation task. But actually, no, they're doing a perception task. Why? Well, when you do a robot deployment, there are three things that you need to consider. What is the value of the labor that you're producing? You either have to be cheaper than the human doing the job or better than the human doing the job. And right now with the state of the art, it would be very hard to make a grape harvesting robot or pruning robot or spraying robot that would either be cheaper than the minimum wage that is typical in these kind of agricultural scenarios or better than the human. Very, very difficult to even have a 10% increase. And then you have to think about cost, right? Like how much R&D is it to even get to something? How much is it gonna cost to maintain it? And between value and cost, we can calculate some kind of ROI. But the third thing, which is very important, is what is the risk, right?

If this robot f*cks up, how much sh*t am I in? Right? If you have a manipulation robot building luxury cars and the manipulation robot fails, you have either broken that car or you've stopped the entire production line. So you have a big reliability cliff. You need to be able to show the customer that we have 99.999 uptime because it's just very costly if the robot fails. And think of Tesla, right, the self-driving car. Value, comparable to a human driver, so sure, there's some value there. Cost doesn't need, I mean, there's a lot of R&D but after the R&D once those billions are spent, a self-driving car does not have to be meaningfully more expensive than a normal car, which is good, but what's the right? When a self-driving car fails, people die.

Rich Robinson:

risk.

Nils:

very, very big reliability cliff. And what Jonathan at Budbreak realized is that there are very valuable, low-cost, low-risk perception tasks in agriculture. So for example, when it comes to vineyards, there's a single crop destroying disease that I'm blanking on the name now, but it destroys up to $60,000 worth of grapes per hectare per year. And

Rich Robinson:

Viticulture.

Nils:

what Jonathan did is he They worked with experts to recognize this disease and train computer vision models that recognize this disease very early. And he built a Mars Rover for vineyards, like a very rugged vehicle that autonomously drives through the vineyard and does this very advanced computer vision, which is now better at detecting this disease than the people working the vineyard. right? Which means that instead of doing the pruning or the harvesting better or cheaper than a human, it's instead increasing the yield of the whole vineyard because it can find these early signs of this blight. so that the farmer can go.

Rich Robinson:

The grape doctor is in. Just like in the medical world, early detection is really important. And then also I met the founder of Harrison.ai — Vietnamese founder, who moved to Boston, and they do AI detection of scans. And they're already 40 % better than most humans. So why not bring that to other biological areas where there is some sort of disease or blight fascinating except that's where perception alone just creates so much value

Nils:

Perception alone allows you to capture some territory there, go out and do something. And what does this have to do with co-embodiment, right? Well, for one, there might be very many different perception stacks that you might want to run on the same robot, obviously. So one team that's not Budbreak might train some computer vision that does good yield estimation or something like this. And it would be really nice if they could run that same intelligence on the same robot. But also, Budbreak putting a modular arm on the Mars rover thing. Initially just to bring a camera closer to what they're looking at, but eventually as manipulation gets better that arm will be able to maybe do some pruning, maybe do some harvesting, right?

Rich Robinson:

Spray something for the blight, who knows, right? And all the above.

Nils:

And the point is, Jonathan does not have to be the person to solve that necessarily if you embrace co-embodiment, right? Some other lab can be like, "Well, okay, so there are all of these robots out there that have this hardware that could support my use case already. I'm going to deploy onto those robots." So we're doing something similar in retail this year where we're taking wheeled humanoids and we're deploying them in a retail environment to do perception tasks. Again, when we say we're gonna put wheeled humanoids in retail, people assume it's restocking or order picking. No, the software is not quite ready for that. The hardware might be, probably is, but the software isn't. But what you can teach one of these robots to do good enough this year is task generation for the humans.

Rich Robinson:

So that's fascinating. Let's double click on that. So this is in your home country of Sweden that you're deploying these. You and I, in December, you came and gave a guest lecture at my class. I teach at Peking University. I teach entrepreneurship. And you completely unscrewed the top of everybody's skulls and re-tilled, rewired their brains. And one of my students ended up getting into robotics. And he's now working at Galbot, which we visited together. And we visited some other companies and you laid out your not just vision, but how you're practically doing this because of course from the wrist up, the hand, I mean, that's as complex as the rest of the robot. So let's just wait until that catches up through AI and through advances in actuators and et cetera and co-embodiment and whatever. But in the meantime, so you just said the robots are helping the humans be more like give tasks to the humans. Is that the humans giving tasks to the robot? The robot is now giving tasks to the human. So it's a store manager robots. So somebody shows up at this retail location. And what kind of data are they being handed? What kind of tasks are they being handed? And how have you pulled that together?

Nils:

So. So the first thing we built was an augmented reality task management system that allowed the human store manager to go assign tasks in physical space to different people. And now the robot is going to use the same augmented reality task manager to assign tasks to humans. And it can do things like find empty shelves that need to be restocked. It can find missing or erroneous price tags, things that need to be cleaned up.

Just the kind of stuff that the store manager would tell the associates to fix. The robot will fix. And what turned us on to this is we had one of Europe's largest retailers with over 10,000 associates out on the floor, which is small compared to Walmart has 2 million associates out on the floor. But over 10,000 associates and they flew to our lab in Hong Kong and they said, here's a problem. We estimate that we lose 30 to 60 minutes per associate per day, predominantly in the morning, to them not being super sure what they should be working on.

Rich Robinson:

Wow, I mean that's a huge needle mover. Think about the literally hundreds of thousands of hours every month that add up at Scandinavian wages, that's real.

Nils:

So what we realized we can do is we can take hardware that is in theory ready for manipulation tasks like restocking, et cetera, and deploy them today to do perception tasks. And when the software is ready, either because we made it or someone else made it, it can be co-embodied in this robot. Like we can go capture that territory already and make sure that there are robots as infrastructure. That when someone has made... an AI that can do restocking, there are already robots-as-infrastructure that AI can inhabit. Right. So you send your restocking agent to go live inside the Galbot that Auki deployed. And the reason I think this is important is one, it's going to allow us to actually deploy the robots faster with something that gets demonstrable ROI already.

Rich Robinson:

as infrastructure.

Nils:

But last night I was having a long, painful conversation with a big retailer with 20,000 locations, one of the biggest in the world by location count. And they wanted to brainstorm about the robots. And it's just so difficult to deal with because it's like, our dream is a robot that does absolutely everything, right? There has to be some initial ROI before we can do anything, right? And we've looked at, you know, people working on maybe restocking robots, but if that's all it does, we don't know. Because we don't want to have to get a second and a third and a fourth robot. Like our stores are not that big. It has to be one robot that eventually does everything. And maybe it's better for us to wait until there's a robot that does everything because we don't want to have to keep switching robots.

Rich Robinson:

Which seems like a, you know, an ignorant, kind of a fair. It's a fair position.

Nils:

And I think the robot labs have not, you know, because a lot of them are, you know, PhDs that never talk to customers have not realized that this is going to be a big sales blocker. And what allows us to unblock these conversations with these big retailers is like, "Here's how you will get very clear ROI on the perception tasks first."

Right. And this will justify you putting the robot in there and That means that when these other tasks are ready, like restocking or order picking, that's a software update on the robot-as-infrastructure that you've already deployed.

Rich Robinson:

Amazing Just like in The Matrix: just call up Tank and he just, you know, basically teaches you

Nils:

So that's been a big push for me these last 100 days or so, talking to other robotics labs about, "We need to figure out some open standards for co-embodiment. Everyone's working on cross-embodiment, and that's super important. But co-embodiment would be such a big unlock if we could figure out how to make something like a robot OS that allows us to share a robot body."

Rich Robinson:

And you also mentioned, I thought was quite fascinating. If you think about it, like I saw Mr. Beast, he launched Feastables, his chocolate brand. And he said that he had to dispatch a lot of people to the stores to make sure they were displayed properly and they didn't fall over. you're basically in some ways, instead of metal humanoids, it's meat robots that you're dispatching there so that you can perceive the world through them. So now there's your robot. It's it's already in the store. Everybody's everybody's productive. It's got a little free time. And then who who could take over the robot during the day?

Nils:

I would not say that. So every Friday we have internal demo day, right? Where we show each other what we've been working on at Auki. And one of the demos from this Friday was sign in to do tele-inspection. So to give a little bit of background for scale. One of the world's most famous beverage brands told us that in the...

Rich Robinson:

Its name will remain Coca-Cola. Yes. Anyway, I'm guessing.

Nils:

told us that in Sweden alone, they have hundreds of field reps whose job is hop in a car, drive out to the retail location, make sure that things are set up properly and that contracts are being followed and blah, blah, And by back-of-the-napkin calculation, they said it probably costs us on the order of a hundred bucks per inspection, right? Total cost of everything. Some inspections, obviously cheaper, some of them obviously more expensive, but you know, on the order of a hundred bucks per inspection, they said. And what we demonstrated this Friday is that instead of hopping in a car, you can remotely hop into the robot. So you sign into the robot at this store that you want to visit and you say, "Hey, here are my Coca-Cola, Pepsi, whatever credentials. Please take me to my shelf so I can look at it."

Rich Robinson:

Your cap or whatever.

Nils:

And then the robot autonomously drives there.

turns off the camera so you can't be spying on everything else because the retailers are very happy with that part of the feature. And then when it arrives, it turns on the camera so that you can do a remote inspection.

Rich Robinson:

And like full 360, camera, video, and captures and gives recommendations.

Nils:

With a semi-humanoid, they'll be able to even reach in and look because there's a camera on the wrist. So they'll be able to look in and try to count the tops of like how many, get a sense of how many there are. And this use case is interesting enough to some of the biggest brands out there that we're putting together a consortium of them now to actually sponsor the robots so that the retailers don't have to buy the robot. They'll pay for the robot and put the robot out there because they save so much money on not doing the inspections manually.

Rich Robinson:

Fascinating, love it. Thank you for triple-clicking on Auki Labs and your vision. And you and I knew each other from Beijing and then we reconnected in late 2024. We went on a hike in Hong Kong. I've been a serial entrepreneur, but I've also been a serial ecosystem guy. I love bringing people together and just creating a space for people to collaborate and connect. And you had this idea with Mike from GEODNET and the guys from Mawari and peaq to found the organization on my hat, Intercognitive Foundation, which first of all, what an amazing, beautiful name, you know, knowledge in between: Intercognitive.com And you waxed futuristic about this vision of making the physical world accessible to AI. We've been talking about humanoids at one end and then DePIN and data at the other. And then of course, there's training and orchestration and apps and payment and compute and maps and all these moving parts, literally and figuratively, to make the physical world accessible for AI. There are industry groups for robotics, for DePIN, for payments and mapping and everything. But to have all these layers, these nine layers that you've identified, to be able to sing and dance together. That's really a beautiful vision when humanoids will roam among us and be able to pass Steve Wozniak's coffee test of summoning a robot into your home to make a cup of coffee. So please share with the listeners about the origin story and your vision of Intercognitive.

Nils:

The honest origin story without fluff. So GEODNET and Auki are both working on positioning for different kinds of environments. They make really, really good positioning for the outdoors, very good for agriculture, and we make really good positioning for the indoors.

Mike and I, kept saying, "Obviously, at some point in the future, you're going to be able to switch between these protocols and they're going to work seamlessly. We should work on that integration." But up until basically this year, it was never his priority or my priority to go do it at any given moment. It would be a great tech demo, but who's the customer now? The robots weren't there yet. The use cases weren't there yet. So eventually, we said, "Okay, what if we pooled some money and put out like an open-source bounty to go do it? Because our time is more valuable than our money. We could pull some money to get this done." And that idea just kind of spiraled into actually, there's a whole laundry list of things that need to get done. Because if you take a step back, 70% of the world economy, both by GDP and by headcount is tied to physical locations and physical labor. So the biggest impact that AI will ever have is in the physical world. Like when you go from agentic AI to physical AI, you've 3x to 4x the total addressable market right off the bat. So, you know, Anthropic, OpenAI, they're going to be significantly smaller than whoever becomes the predominant physical AI company, which probably the biggest opportunity in civilization now apart from longevity maybe.

Rich Robinson:

Got me so excited. The biggest industry in the history of mankind and civilization. Yes.

Nils:

And, but we need, AI can only work on digital things, right? And the physical world is not digital. So an obvious thing that needed to be fixed is, we need to start digitizing the physical world. We need to start mapping it. We need to solve positioning. But there are all kinds of other things that you don't realize is an issue when you're in the lab. Like how does the robot have internet connection? How does the robot identify itself?

Why does it need to identify itself? Well, because the robot needs to be able to, for example, call a cab or hail an elevator, enter a building, it needs to identify itself. Today, robots have a place of work, so it's not an issue, but clearly we want to get to a point where your humanoid robot can go to my apartment complex and pick up a cup of sugar for you and go back, right?

Rich Robinson:

enter a building, pick up something, yeah.

Nils:

But then, how does it identify itself? How does it pay for things? How do you insure a robot? Right? How do you ship a robot across borders today? There are so many things that need to happen in the physical world before robots can start rolling out at scale. And we realized there is no industry group that's taking a holistic view at how ready are we as a civilization to have robots? So let's put even more money in, not just put up one little bounty, but let's try to fund an industry group who goes through the checklist of how do we get civilization ready for the robots.

Rich Robinson:

And that's Intercognitive. And I learned a really good lesson in my life. I've met a few people like your good self who really can see around corners and then the next corner and then under and over and around. And Yat Siu, the founder of Animoca Brands, he asked me to be an advisor and I quickly said yes.

Nils:

cognitive.

Rich Robinson:

and Balaji Srinivasan, the founder of Network State. I was part of the first cohort and I'm very involved there. And in your good self where I feel a little bit challenged because who really does fully understand the entirety of AI and robotics and making AI accessible for the physical world? Probably very few people. But that's okay because I really love to create a space for people and to be able to bring people together and then I bring together all the experts and then you guys do all the magic around research and standard settings and then I just have to amplify that message. And then along the way I get to selfishly build up an amazing network and see problems that I can then invest, advise and start up. So typically I would do a startup and then I would start an industry group because it would be a great way to become a thought leader and create a network, not in a glad handing transactional way, but in a, you know, I want to be able to have a philosophy of abundance and bring people together. But now you convinced me and I'm very happy. I took that silver pill to front load the industry group and then do this for a couple of years and then figure out what I'm going to do in this space. And it's been an absolutely insane ride. you know, we've doubled membership. I want to double it again and double it yet again by the end of the year and bring in all the different stakeholders to be able to make the physical world accessible for AI. I thank you, my friend, both for bringing me in and giving me this silver pill for Intercognitive Foundation and also joining me while you're here on a well-deserved little family holiday on the island of the gods.

Put your hands together once again for Nils Pihl everybody. Thank you.

Nils:

Thank you for the conversation and coffee.

Rich Robinson:

Thank you my friend.

Nils:

That was fun.

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