418: Aitomatic with Christopher Nguyen Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Christopher Nguyen is the CEO of Aitomatic, which provides knowledge-first AI for industrial automation.


Chad talks with Christopher about why having a physical sciences background matters for this work, if we have artificial intelligence, why we still need people, and working in knowledge-first AI instead of knowledge-second, knowledge-third, or no knowledge at all. Data reflects the world.



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Transcript:


CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Christopher Nguyen, CEO of Aitomatic, which provides knowledge-first AI for industrial automation. Christopher, thanks for joining me.


CHRISTOPHER: Thank you.


CHAD: So I was prepping for this interview, and I noticed something that jumped out at me that we have in common, and that is your first computer was the TI-99C/4A.


CHRISTOPHER: No kidding.


CHAD: And that was also my first computer.


CHRISTOPHER: Oh, okay.


CHAD: [laughs]


CHRISTOPHER: You got no storage, correct?


CHAD: No storage; everything was off of the solid-state disks. And I remember I was a little late to it. My parents actually got it for me. I think I was 9 or 10. And my parents got it for me at a garage sale. And so all I had was the manual and the basic manual that came with it. And because it had no storage, I needed to type in the programs that were in the back of that book from scratch, and there was no way to save them. So you would type them in -- [laughs]


CHRISTOPHER: Oh my God. Every single day the same code over and over again. And hopefully, you don't turn it off.


CHAD: [laughs] Exactly. There definitely were times where it would just be on in my room because I didn't want to lose what I had spent all day typing in.


CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, yeah, I remember my proudest moment was my sister walked into the living room...and there was no monitor, and you connected it directly to the TV.


CHAD: To the TV, yeah.


CHRISTOPHER: And younger people may not even know the term character graphics, which is you pick in your book the character space, and then you put them together into a graphic image. And I painstakingly, on graph paper, created a car and converted it to hex and then poked it into these characters and put them together. And my sister walked in like, "Oh my God, you made a car."


[laughter]


CHAD: That was a good time. It was difficult back then. I feel like I learned a lot in an environment where I see people learning. Today it's a lot more of a complicated environment. They're much higher up the stack than we were back then. And, I don't know, I feel like I actually sort of had it easy.


CHRISTOPHER: Well, in many ways, that very abstraction to...you see jobs like to talk about higher software abstraction to make you more productive. I think it's absolutely that powerful. And Marc Andreessen, my friend, likes to talk about how software is eating the world. But it turns out there's one perspective where people have gone up the stack a little too far, too fast, and too much. We're still physical in the industry that I work in.


You know, our previous company was acquired by Panasonic. And I've been working on industrial AI for the last four and a half years. And it's very hard for us to find people with the right physics or electro engineering background and the right science understanding to help automate and build some of these systems because everybody's in software now.


CHAD: Why does physical sciences background matter for this work?


CHRISTOPHER: Let me give you a couple of examples. One example is one of our customers is a very large global conglomerate doing marine navigation and marine sensors. And one of the products they do is fish findi