Autonomy

Um, so a company called Skycutter, a company called, um, uh, F-Drones, um, uh, I'm actually just having a brain freeze on the third one from V40, from, uh, a company that's called Hyperscale, which is fundamentally based on a, on a Ukrainian company called Green Tech.

Um, Eric Schmidt's company, Perennial Autonomy, which is an American company but fundamentally built and battle-tested.

Ukraine is getting orders.

Um, there's a Croatian company that's now in the United States that's fundamentally Ukrainian, you know, tested.

I don't know where they found him.

He comes in, and he decides he wants to grow HP again, and what does he do? He goes out and buys a UK-based software company called Autonomy.

He pays eleven point one billion dollars for the acquisition.

This is a company that was trading at five point nine billion before, and this was one of those few acquisitions where everybody thought he was paying too much.

Nobody understood.

So here's the way he explained why he went from five point nine to eleven point two.

In fact, he did a very elaborate explanation of how he got from the original book value, sort of the accounting value for Autonomy, to the eleven point one billion.

The original book value is about two point one billion for Autonomy.

So what we have is automation, if you'd like, really good automation, but we're starting to get automation, but not autonomy.

Hmm.

Autonomy is where the robot has to deal with unseen circumstances, make decisions about it, and accommodate it, and that's one of the big gaps.

Right.

And how do we bridge that? Is that using AI? Is it training an AI to recognize, "I think I'm going for a coffee pot, but the coffee pot's actually on the drying rack.

So that's gonna be really exciting.

They had their first Autonomy and AI Day last year-

Mm-hmm, which you went to

...

Mm-hmm.

And we'll be able to check out what's going on with autonomy, because we're supposed to get point-to-point driving at the end of 2026.

Did they talk about point-to-point driving last year in Autonomy Day? And if so, what was the date they promised it by? [laughs]

Yeah, late 2026.

So what we have is automation, if you'd like, really good automation, but we're starting to get automation, but not autonomy.

Hmm.

Autonomy is where the robot has to deal with unseen circumstances, make decisions about it, and accommodate it, and that's one of the big gaps, right?

And how do we bridge that? Is that using AI? Is it training an AI to recognize, "I think I'm going for a coffee pot, but the coffee pot's actually on the drying rack.

Do I need to visually recognize where it is and how to hold it and all of those things?" You just start to sketch out the complexity involved here.