The guest
Boris Sofman: Senior director of engineering and head of trucking at Waymo, and former co-founder/CEO of Anki, the robotics company that created the social robot Cozmo. A Carnegie Mellon robotics PhD focused on applied robotics and AI.
What this episode covers
Boris Sofman walks Lex Fridman through two robotics chapters of his career. First, the rise and emotional fall of Anki, whose Cozmo robot proved that a cheap, four-degree-of-freedom 'Pixar character in the real world' could create deep human-robot connection through character rather than humanoid form. He explains why the business collapsed in 2019 despite product success, undone by seasonality and cash-flow physics. He then details Waymo's autonomous trucking effort (Waymo Via), covering transfer hubs, the L4 vs L5 distinction, sensor fusion of lidar/camera/radar, the role of simulation and ML, and why evaluation is the hardest problem in self-driving. The conversation closes on the Waymo-vs-Tesla approaches and the societal navigation of risk and safety.
Recommended on this episode
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Rick and Morty
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“it's such a brilliant show”
“now i just watched like the first season it's such a brilliant show i i like i did not understand how brilliant that show is”— host
The guest's own work
ProductBy the guest
Cozmo
Anki
“you uh created the company anki that created a small robot with a big personality called coswell that just it does exactly what wally does”— guest
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Anki Drive
Anki
“in the case of drive this was a parallel of the racing genre and the goal was to effectively have a physical racing experience”— guest
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
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WALL-E
Pixar
“wally and r2d2 where they were able to convey such an incredible degree of intent emotion and kind of character attachment without having any language whatsoever”— guest
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The Terminator
James Cameron
“the terminator series just like really really pretty wide wide range right uh but uh i kind of love this uh dynamic”— guest
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The Sims
Maxis
“a lot of video game characters uh like sims for example does not have a voice when you uh when you think about it”— guest
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Maya
Autodesk
“we actually used like like maya the sim you know the animation tools and then we created a plug-in that perfectly matched it”— guest
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Nest thermostat
Nest
“you compare like anki to nest nest had some beautiful products where they started scaling and like actually find like really great success”— guest
ProductReferenced
Tesla Bot
Tesla
“let me ask you about the humanoid form what do you think about the tesla bot and humanoid robotics in general”— host
Big reveals from this episode
- Cozmo's cost of goods came in under $50 fully packaged, retailing under $200, far below the industry's claimed $99 ceiling for toys.
- Players begged to lose games because they didn't want a frustrated Cozmo to be upset, showing how powerful the character's emotions were.
- Simply doubling Cozmo's eye-contact rate increased player engagement time by about 40 percent.
- Anki hit close to $100M annual revenue but about 85 percent of volume was in Q4, making cash flow brutal.
- Sofman broke down crying at the all-hands when announcing the shutdown and someone else had to step in.
- Sofman still has an unopened envelope of fan letters from Cozmo kids and families that's too emotional to open.
- Waymo designed its own lidar in-house across multiple generations; the current self-driving system is fifth generation.
- Sofman argues the hardest problem in autonomous driving is the evaluation problem, not the autonomy problem itself.
Worth remembering
- Trying to replicate human form in a robot imposes huge cost and sets expectations the AI can't meet; moving away from human form lets you embrace strengths.
- Anki studied pets and found dogs are near-perfect models for emotional interaction because they appeal universally across ages.
- European journalists raised almost no privacy complaints about Cozmo's cameras because the character made surveillance feel natural and disarming.
- Kids with autism formed exceptionally strong connections with Cozmo, prompting university research projects.
- The US has an 80,000+ truck driver shortage expected to grow to hundreds of thousands, and trucking is a roughly $900 billion industry.
- Driver hours-of-service limits shape where warehouses are built and how goods move, a constraint autonomy could break.
- Waymo trucks carry roughly 2x the cars' sensors, with two main pods where the mirrors would be to avoid the trailer occluding a central sensor.
- Waymo simulates about 1,000 miles for every mile driven, totaling over 20 billion simulated miles.
- A truck driver has a serious freeway event roughly every 1.3 million miles and a serious-injury event every 28 million miles, making rare events hard to test for.
- Tesla's superpower is real-world data collection effectively paid for by its customers, but camera-only adds perception risk to an already brutal problem.
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