Symbotic

That was my column I wrote, uh, mid-2000s.

I wrote the Symbotics column.

Yeah.

And it was basically like you have the whole off-season to figure out who you like, and you gotta stick to your guns the first two, three weeks.

Um, and again, it, it's to the, to the limitations of the, the, the hardware of the hands, but also, um, I think whenever you're dealing with contact, it's, it's much more difficult.

You know, we've got some parts of our Symbotic robots, our system is six nines of reliability, so, you know, one in a million failures, um, or less than one in a million failures.

But sometimes that's not good enough because we're moving 10 million cases a day.

So, you know, 10 failures a day isn't, is not good enough.

But, uh, yeah, I started working on, uh, walking humanoids and then autonomous helicopters and then autonomous cars, um, from my time at Stanford and, uh, University of Tokyo and, and then G- uh, Carnegie Mellon University.

Um, spent a lot of time in academia trying to build some research, mostly on motion planning, and then, um, was part of the early team that was recruited to build the self-driving car prototypes at Google, which is now Waymo, um, and then was, uh, uh, recruited by Toyota to build the Toyota Research Institute, and then in Japan, where we had, uh, crossed paths before when I was, uh, CEO of, of Woven by Toyota, um, building up that company, um, to deliver au- autonomous driving and safety technology software and systems for Toyota and Lexus as a, as a, as a company.

Uh, and then the last two years working on Symbotic, really, we are building actually the fleet of the largest autonomous, um, uh, vehicles, uh, that are doing logistics operations.

So we have about over 20,000 robots doing 50 miles a day carrying 50-pound boxes.

But generally...

What's going to happen is that companies like Chef and others, like Bedrock Robotics and Construction and Locust Robotics and Warehousing and Symbotic and Warehousing, they're going to focus on particular applications.

And my hunch is that in the long run, that's really where a lot of value will accrue because the model layer itself will become more and more commodity over time, especially with China.

If you believe the hypothesis that the pre-training will come from a combination of video data or tele-op data for at least the base pre-trained model, Well, China has a lot of people to collect that data.

Ford has tens of millions of dollars that it can deploy to companies who specialize in this.

Companies like Honeywell, Dematic, Symbotic, Winwright.

These companies who specialize in engineering robotic solutions for a particular product.

In Ford's case, it would be an assembly line.

Yeah.

So, you know, Walmart is installing its first MFC, micro-fulfillment center, powered by Symbotic into a store after they had a, a not dissimilar tie-up last year.

And Ocado, they are opening their first fully automated warehouse, their, their CFC, customer fulfillment center, in South Korea, um, with, with Lotte Mart.

Now, they've been partnering with Lotte Mart since 2022.

[laughs]

...

the AutoStore partnership, Walmart announced that automation technology com- Symbotic began installing-

Yeah

It has been two weeks since I last brought you the headlines.

And this morning, we've got news on Walmart's latest automation bet with Symbotic and Primark's continued march across the U.S. with a new Minnesota store.

But we begin today with a New York City bill that could reshape how Amazon delivers packages in the five boroughs.

The Delivery Protection Act, backed by Mayor Zoran Mandani and City Councilmember Tiffany Caban, would require Amazon and other last-mile delivery operators to directly employ their couriers rather than routing them through a network of contracted delivery service partners.

All right, we are back.

And next up, we have Walmart putting its money where its automation ambitions are.

Symbotic has begun installing its first SIM microsystem inside the back of an actual Walmart store.

Part of the company's broader partnership that has Walmart funding Symbotic's build out of pickup and delivery centers in exchange for Symbotic having bought Walmart's old robotics business last year.