Intempus gives robots emotional intelligence so they can communicate failure states and intent to non-technical humans

together. You can get started for free. Go to figma. com. It's fantastic product. Jord's addicted. He's a Figma addict. He can't stop using Figma. He designs endless slide decks in it. Um our our beautiful website tbpn. com was designed in Figma. Um we've actually experimented the entire overlay that you've seen.

This is all from Figma and then gets baked into our production software which we don't talk about because it's our secret. It's our secret sauce. Anyway, welcome to the stream, Teddy. Good to have you here. How are you doing? Good. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me.

I heard um I heard y'all are in a new studio, which is We are This is the first day. We have a giant first. Yeah, it's it's an honor. I'm We're in it with Teal Fellow Tuesday. We're very excited to have you here. They said it couldn't happen. Yeah. Uh can you introduce yourself? break us down. What are you building?

How'd you get there? Where'd you grow up? Give me the whole thing. I'm Teddy from North Carolina. I used to work in a in a maker space in a machine shop. This is my technical baseline. One way or another, found myself in California. Uh worked at Mid Journey in a past life. Now I run a robotics lab called Intempus.

This is so funny about the Teal Fellowship.

really quickly like the whole idea is like dropping out of college and Jordy was making this joke that like oh like you know the teal fellowship has a combined you know five years of work experience because like no one's supposed to have worked and it's like a joke that every every startup's like oh you have 20 years of management experience combined but like most of you that we've talked to have years of experience somehow.

So were you working and going to school like how did you work at midjourney while not while not like dropping out yet? If you want the the very a bridged teddy timeline is I I grew up in North Carolina, worked in this in this machine shop in this maker space for about four years. Somehow wound up in biotech.

I was doing manufacturing for invasive electrodes for chronically ill children. So everything from EEG to ECG electrodes. Very cool. With an engineer. Uh discovered I I was actually like exceedingly squeamish. And so on a whim went to university in LA at USC for about a year. Uh studied art. Jord's back. Hey, I'm back.

I'm back. I had to hit the air horn. How's it going for SC? Yeah, let's go. Let's go. We love USC. Um, had a total blast. Studied art and technology and and a bit of business and some film and the whole shebang. I I know when you go to California, you get pretty caught up in the culture.

And so, unsurprisingly, I started the venture. Um, wound up meeting David, MidJourney David through this venture. Uh, which is how I wound up at Midjourney. Very cool. About a year ago now. Nice. Left nine months ago. Now I run a robotics lab called Intempus. I make robots expressive.

Robots currently suck at communicating what they're doing. They're really hard to understand. You have to pay expensive nerds like me to come use the command line anytime you're trying to understand what they're what they're up to. And so I make them communicate like every other mammal and like every other human.

Uh such that you can interact with a robot even though you don't speak its language. What are we talking about robots? I felt like it was pretty easy that that robot that was like on a stand. Oh yeah. Yeah. Flailing around killing it. That was pretty I understand some of it's telltale. Yeah.

I mean, are we talking about like industrial robots like like like cucka arms and stuff or are we talking Roombas or the future humanoid robots? Like what's the first product that you think needs what's the first robot that really needs humanization? Sure.

I mean, a as you can tell like robots is probably the largest umbrella term that we have. It spans from humanoids to like glorified Roombas and everything in between. So, how do you make them expressive? Well, I think it's uh quite telltale. If I have an anthropomorphic robot like a humanoid, I can say, "Oh, it waves.

" Or, "Oh, it it smiles or moves around and you know, this makes sense. " But, Inis focuses on non-anthropomorphic robots, specifically the ones that already exist. So, where do robots exist? They exist in industry. Yeah, robots work great in industry. 99% of the time, they work wonderfully.

Uh, like if you think about an Amazon warehouse, there's a bunch of little Roombas that roll around and move the the carts and stuff. Uh, and you know, on occasion, probably 1% of the time, these robots fail. And they hardly ever fail for technically complex reasons. Usually robots fail for some trivial reason.

Say, um, you know, Jord's in a in an Amazon warehouse, and there's a Rainbow trying to pass him, and it gets stuck because Jord's in his way. And so the the robot in the warehouse just fails and it leaves a fail code in the command line and it moves on and does something else.

And what Intempus does is we allow these robots to be expressive. We allow them to give convey their intent to people like Jordy in this case who would not otherwise understand what the robot is trying to do. So what if this robot upon I'm not I'm not technical. I'm not technical. Just really just not a shock.

If you see if if you see a robot like getting nippy with you like a small dog, it's like, oh [ __ ] I should probably move out of the robot's way. And so you can save a bunch of money on debug costs uh and also reduce downtime of robots just by allowing them to communicate what they're up to.

And in the future, of course, we'll get into consumer and service and humanoids, but right now it's an all industry. Awesome. Uh I mean uh you gave the example of Amazon. They acquired KA systems in 2017, eight years now. Uh I'm sure they're thinking about this.

uh is Amazon the right customer for you or do you want to start kind of in the more mid-market or do you want to be more you know productled growth developerled growth hackers get into like the next generation of robotics companies? What's the go to market look like? Yeah, I I have a few thoughts here.

I mean so in Tempest's initial customer base are all enterprise robotics manufacturers. They're people who sell the robots to Amazon. Yep. Uh, and seemingly everyone is vertically integrating in in this policy space.

I think it's hardly prophetic for me to say that we're going to have a lot of robots in the future, uh, whether it be in industry or in service or in consumer, and that these robots are going to have to interact with humans.

And it's quite shocking that, you know, not many people are focused on the interaction layer, how humans and robots are going to interact. Instead, they're focused on making robots functional. Yeah. And so, I'd love if more players like Amazon and big big players would get into the space.

I want you guys to imagine like say you're walking down Hollywood uh to the office in 10 years from now and you pass by 20 robots uh and one robot is running an Amazon model and one is running an Inmpus model and one is running a a Tesla model.

This is like the same experience as going to talk with a like walking down the street and chatting with a Nigerian and then a Canadian and then a Lithuanian. There's three different languages, three different dialects, three different humors. It's a terrible user experience.

uh and so it's seemingly very important that we figure out one standardized means of human robot interaction and the way that I'm prolifer proliferating into this space is through the enterprise manufacturers that are selling robots to big companies to small companies as long as there's a scalable impact I'll work with them cool how influenced are you by uh movies like Wall-E right you know the sort of the fun robot feel it feels like you want robots to be uh doing serious work but in a have it be sort of enjoyable to interact with them.

Is Is that Is that accurate? Yes, absolutely. Uh I'm a big Interstellar fan. Yeah, Tar. Great robot. Tarsus is killer. Tar is killer. There's one scene in Interstellar where Cooper sets Tar's humor level or truth level to like 90%. 90%. Yeah.

One of the tricks like behind making robots expressive is giving them emotions because what are you expressing? Well, you're expressing emotions. And you can view all of these as scalers. Yeah. And so I can give robots a 90% humor level or a 90% joy level. And so it's pretty cool.

Like it it shocking to me how on point Tarsus is. There's a whole bunch of like interesting media that came out of the the creation of Interstellars on how they they simultaneously made Tar he's a cold ex-military robot and also Cooper's best friend. And so this is absolutely the the intention. Fantastic.

Uh talk to me about the tech stack. I imagine that you mentioned command lines. Are you doing post training on a fin on a foundation model? Are you using llama open source stuff? Like what what how do you actually uh solve the technical problem? What what is deeper in the supply chain of your tech stack?

So there's as I mentioned earlier like seemingly everyone is focused on vertically integrating control policy. All the big companies are doing this and you get big horizontal companies that are awesome like physical intelligence. Y and I really don't want to compete with these people. In fact, I want to work with them.

And so when I initially put my mind to how do I construct this architecture, I I had to say like okay, I absolutely need to be an augmentation at top the transformer layer. So after uh you know a robot is told what to do by its decision transformer, I run this interaction layer.

Now I want you guys uh you guys have both heard the phrase time flies when you're having fun. Of course, this is like a pretty integral way in which humans perceive the world. The inverse is also true. Your perception of time moves slower when you're stressed.

And so we have fun and stress to emotions and they change how we perceive the world subjectively. And so what in Tempest does uh we equip these things called time constants. The question is like time flies when you're having fun. What is time for a robot? Well, time is compute.

So what if you could allocate compute such that when a robot is having fun or when it's, you know, not needed to do any like daunting task, it can use the minimum amount of compute necessary. we can move as quickly as possible.

But when a robot is stressed, you know, and it's failing, uh, it should use more compute to a collect more data so we can train the and and squash the edge case and b convey why it fails to again people in factories and people that would otherwise not understand what the robot is trying to do. Yeah.

And that that aligns with like test time inference scaling rules right now where you want to do more reasoning for harder problems. That makes sense. Yeah. Very cool. Uh, anything else, Jordy? Are we good? I think we're good, but come back on again soon, Teddy. Yeah, fantastic.

This is this is super exciting and uh I look forward to interacting uh speaking uh the the Intempus language with many many robots throughout my life. Me too. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Cheers, dude. Bye. Bye. Next up, we have Sigil, founder of Extraordinary, coming on the stream. Very excited to have him.

I got to say, these TFL is pretty punctual. I was about to say running late. This is a very crazy thing. You get this calendar invite. You just hop on the stream, buddy. He's here right on time. It's amazing. Hey, join at 142. Um, Sigil, great to have you on. How you doing? I'm doing pretty good. How are you?

Uh, doing great. It's been a super fun day so far. Uh, the class is absolutely stacked and congrats on on making it in. Why don't you start with a bit of backstory, your personal story, and then what you're working on? Yeah. So, I'm C Joel, the founder of extraordinary. com.

We are the extraordinary talent company of America. Um, if you Google 01 visa for extraordinary ability, you'll find my face is the cover image. And I'm the guy going around giving out these alien of extraordinary ability hoodies that you see on your ex feed. Amazing.

Uh, talk about your personal journey to kind of building this company. Yeah. So, um, when I was in high school, uh, I built this, uh, project that was, I think he did like 100K in revenue this first month. And I used the funds to pay someone to finish high school for me. And I San Francisco.

And, um, I came here on a tourist visa. I'm originally from Toronto, Canada. I'm like, "Holy [ __ ] these people are based uh, these