Friday Wrap-up: Physical AI and China's Speed Advantage

Hi everyone, and welcome back to In Good Company, the Friday wrap up. I'm Sil Marteskar. Nicolas Hagen here. Hi, and this week's episode featured Brian Ju, which is Vice Chairman and President of Xpeng. And if you haven't listened to it, you should listen to it, because, Nikolay, in my opinion, this episode is mind blowing. Absolutely, totally. So let's start. In the old days, let's say back in 2020, a car company was a car company. Gu doesn't call Xpeng a car company, he calls it a physical AI company. What is that? Well, it's interesting. When we speak to the car manufacturers, they talk about software becoming so important. And it's not only the software to drive the car, it's the software also to link in with the entertainment systems, the self driving systems and so on. Just the software component and the chip part of it is just now so important. And then he also talked about level four, which is fully autonomous cars, including no steering wheel. And he talks about it that this will happen in our lifetime. What's your reaction to hearing how he talks about this? Well, interesting. We did another interview recently with a Chinese automation company and so basically these kind of automation levels, one to four, it means that you go from hands off to eyes off to minds off. Minds off is when you can be fast asleep whilst the car is taking you from A to B. We're going to be properly hands up, hands off according to many people in China now by twenty eight. Will be ice off by thirty and will be mice off by thirty five. So, can then be fast asleep and the application for society is huge, right? It doesn't really matter whether you live far from the city because your transportation time, You can use it for constructive things. There are not going to be many more queues. It just changes the concept of time and space, and I cannot wait. Yeah, and also how you think about cities and where you can live, etc. Okay, but let me paint a picture for you. Flying cars between skyscrapers, robots in the household, gadgets everywhere you look. You know where this scene is from? Sounds a bit like Back to the Future, but I think you have another idea. It's Duckburg, which is the fictional city in Donald Duck. And I think all of us read a lot of Donald Duck as kids, and now these things are finally coming into play. Because it turns out, this is not that far into the future when it comes to flying cars. No, it's not far into the future, it's coming faster. I think it's also interesting how intertwined the supply chain is for cars compared to robots and humanoids. It's pretty much overlapping because what you need for self driving cars is sensors, actuators, is all type of software companies software elements …