Jan Liphardt on AI-Powered Robot Dogs, Open Source Software, and the Ethical Considerations of AI-Driven Robotics
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Introduction
The world of technology is rapidly evolving, and one of the most exciting and potentially transformative areas is AI-driven robotics. Imagine a world where robots are not just machines that perform tasks, but companions that can engage in conversations, assist with daily activities, and even provide emotional support. This is the vision of OpenMind Robotics, a company founded by Jan Liphardt, an associate professor at Stanford University.
OpenMind Robotics: A Pioneer in Open Source Robotics Software
OpenMind is developing open-source software for robots, enabling them to interact with humans in a more natural and engaging way. The company's flagship product, OM-1, is an AI-powered robot dog that can be customized and programmed for a variety of applications.
One of the key differentiators of OpenMind is its open-source approach. By making its software freely available, the company hopes to accelerate the development and adoption of AI companions. This approach also allows for greater transparency and collaboration, as developers can contribute to the software and build upon each other's work.
The Challenges and Opportunities of AI-Driven Robotics
Developing robotics software is no easy feat. One of the biggest challenges is ensuring safety, as robots that interact with humans need to be able to avoid unintended actions that could cause harm.
Another challenge is the ethical considerations of AI-driven robotics. As robots become more sophisticated and integrated into our lives, it's important to consider the potential impact on society and address any ethical concerns proactively.
Despite these challenges, the opportunities for AI-driven robotics are vast. In the healthcare sector, robots could assist with tasks such as patient monitoring and medication delivery. In elder care, robots could provide companionship and assistance with daily activities. And in education, robots could help students learn in new and engaging ways.
The Future of AI Companionship
The future of AI companionship is full of possibilities. As the technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more sophisticated and capable robots that can enhance our lives in countless ways.
OpenMind Robotics is at the forefront of this exciting field, and its open-source approach is helping to democratize access to AI companionship technology. By fostering collaboration and innovation, OpenMind is paving the way for a future where robots are not just machines, but companions that can enrich our lives.
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Automated Transcript
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:00:20]:
Hello, and welcome, everybody. This is Joe from startuprate.io, your startup podcast and YouTube blog from Germany. Today, I'm bringing you another interview. This time with, I would say, dual duty person. He's not only professor at Stanford University, but he's also founder of OpenMind. Hey, Jan. Welcome.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:00:42]:
Jan, a pleasure to be here.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:00:44]:
Totally my pleasure. We may tell our audience that you're joining me here from California, and you are here because we always try to have also entrepreneurs abroad here. My understanding is your mom is German, and your German is is therefore only current in gardening terms. Right?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:01:04]:
Yes. I was born in Frankfurt, but, spent most of my life in The US. And, when my mom calls, we have long conversations about her apple trees and, other other things in the garden.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:01:17]:
I see. Great. So welcome, everybody. Today, we're joined by Jan Lippert, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University and the founder of OpenMind. In sixty seconds, Jan, what inspired the creation of OpenMind, and what problem are you most passionate about solving?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:01:35]:
Oh, I think all of us are fascinated by how quickly computers are becoming smart, and I was curious to see if, those technologies are also relevant to robotics. I started to write software for several robotic dogs in my house, and it turned out that the software we were developing was more broadly useful than we thought at first.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:02:04]:
I was curious because when you talked about dogs, like, you think about family dogs that join you on the couch for petting, that bring you the newspaper in the morning, but or watchdogs. What what kind of dogs we're talking about here?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:02:18]:
Well, I was mostly interested in, dogs for, just more in a family context, not not for security purposes. So the robotic dogs, we're working on, they are designed to be good at conversations. They're designed to be good at helping you in the home, help your children with their homework, things like that more than a standard security robot.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:02:45]:
Mhmm. To our audience, what do you think is the biggest challenge you believe OpenMind is addressing? Share your thoughts and comment. I'm talking about a little bit about you as a founder, origin story and vision, that you share with us the kind of moment that led you to the inception of OpenMind because it usually, many people out there think, well, I have a idea. I just registered my company and that's it. But, usually, if if this is, interesting opportunity, it's usually a problem you solve for somebody else. And how how did you bump into this problem?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:03:26]:
Well, just directly in in my house, I wanted, the robotic dogs to not only be able to talk, but for example, when they're talking to my children and my children ask them for help with their math homework, that, the dogs don't simply give them the answer, but that the dogs would function more like teachers or mentors. And that requires the software to be pretty sophisticated, and you also expect each robot to know quite a bit about the humans they're interacting with. That's probably very important to be a good teacher or mentor is to understand the student. And so that's what led a little bit to, into this area of developing, software for robots where the robots also know quite a bit about the humans that they're interacting with. In terms of the moment or founding something, What I've typically found in the past is that, many of us have things we're very passionate about and that doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna be a good company. But in some situations, when you're passionate about something and you tell other people about it and other people say, oh, this is not so dumb or oh, can I give you money? Those are good indications that whatever you're working on, may be suitable as as as a startup. So, once you get feedback from the world around you, that can be a good indicator for, what might come next with your idea.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:05:14]:
We already established that you have pretty advanced artificial dogs at home who are able to tutor your children in mathematics, something I wouldn't necessarily associate with family dogs. But, the the I think there were significant challenges on the way. Could you share some of the challenges you encountered in early stages and what lessons you write from them?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:05:39]:
Oh, well, there there's, many difficulties on the hardware side. Doing software is one thing, but doing software that controls physical objects is a whole other thing. If there's a bug in the software, the robotic dog might run into the wall or it might knock people over or, it it might do things that you definitely don't want. But the good thing is the really really interesting thing is that the large language models can also explain what they're doing and what some problems might be. Just one funny story. What's really important for robots is that they don't hit people, that they don't collide with things, and the dogs, whenever they sense that someone was close, they would run up to the person and touch them, And that's exactly what we didn't want. And so finally, we asked the software that was running on the dogs, hey, why do you always run up to people and try to touch them? We told you not to do that. And the software said, oh, you know, you told me I'm a dog, and, dogs need to smell things to know if they're dangerous.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:06:55]:
And so, of course, if you tell me that there's a person close by, I have to go to the person and smell them. And so then we understood what the bug was in the software, and then we had to work around that. But when you're dealing with these kind of AI models, they can be truly compelling in their personas and the decisions they're making, and that really took a while to get used to conceptually. Normally, when you're programming an airplane or a car, the airplane or a car is not able to explain to you bugs in their own design. And, of course, they're not particularly interactive, but we're now getting into a world where the robot you're programming can have a conversation with you and tell you what's actually going on.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:07:42]:
Before we get into the next question, I'm curious. Did you actually provide the physical hardware for for the dogs that they could really smell people?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:07:53]:
That's fascinating. Building a sensor for smell is is incredibly difficult, and that's one of the unsolved problems in sensors. Vision is pretty good these days. LIDAR is pretty good. Pressure sensing is developing, but smell is, is very, very difficult. In terms of the hardware, essentially, all of our hardware comes from China, and then we replace all the software for, for security reasons. And then also, we want software that's open so people can see what's going on and they can help improve it as opposed to closed source software.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:08:35]:
Reflecting on the initial years, is there anything you would approach differently now?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:08:41]:
What do you mean by years? We've only been going since August.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:08:48]:
Yeah. Let's assume it's a whole year. I know as an entrepreneur, it re a year really can feel quite long. And since you have long days, different duties, they they kind of feels much longer relative time.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:09:02]:
Well, no. I'm I'm having a blast. The, the technology is moving so quickly, that every other day I wake up to some important advance, either in robotics or in AI. So the days actually feel very short. Things seem to be just going by in a complete blur. You wake up in the morning and then there's deep seek, and then you wake up a week later and then there's grok, and everyone is battling. Everyone wants the smartest AI as quickly as possible, and that is amazing to watch and amazing to be part of. But also as a parent, is a little bit scary, because all of us here are playing with fire, and we're trying to outrun each other.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:09:54]:
But, you know, that's, that has obvious risks, as well.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:10:00]:
Before we get into the industry market and landscape, I'm curious how many artificial dogs are running around in your household right now, and what date names did your children give them?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:10:15]:
Oh, well, right now, they're all muted because, otherwise, they would participate in this conversation, and it would get very complicated, for your listeners. The dogs are frenchie, bits, and bites.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:10:30]:
I see. Your kids do have a sense of humor. I see. But let us talk a little bit about the the industry and market landscape, your competitive edge. Envision open mind becoming a household name. What major industries industry shifts do you foresee facilitating this achievement?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:10:53]:
Well, so right now robotics is really concentrated in three areas. One area is defense. These are things like drones, these are things like, torpedoes and other sort of military assets that are smart and designed to be autonomous. The other area is manufacturing. So imagine a car factory, which is mostly automated or something like a Tesla Gigafactory for batteries, which has very few humans in it. And then there are some very, very simple robots in the household like a Roomba vacuum cleaner, and we are focusing on robots for hospitals, for the home, for schools that are not vacuum cleaners. We're focusing on robots for those environments that are smart, they learn, they know about the humans around them, and they're able to operate responsibly and help the those humans as much as possible. So we're focused on the non defense, non manufacturing robotics, things like, you know, health care hospitals, elder care, schools, and your house.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:12:10]:
That means at one point in the future, you could see Open Mind even producing something like a therapy dog?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:12:17]:
Oh, absolutely. Dogs are great form factors for that. The Japanese had a therapeutic seal, about fifteen years ago for elder care and we've seen children and also grown ups respond very well to many different form factors seals or dogs or small humanoids And the trick is for them to have a face, they need eyes, and they need to look cute, and they need to have an engaging personality. And the actual physical form factor matters less than the ability of the software to emotionally engage the human they're interacting with.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:13:01]:
Mhmm. What are common misconceptions about AI driven robotics and how is OpenMind addressing them?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:13:09]:
Well, it's an extremely new area. Most people think that, large language models are good at producing text outputs or generating movies or audio. What most people don't realize is that essentially all of the large language models today also natively speak robotics. So you can connect GROC, CLOG, Gemini, DeepSeek, O3 Mini to physical hardware and the large language models will start walking around your house and exploring your house. If they're able to write stories then they're able to generate a series of movement commands that allow the robot to navigate a physical environment. So imagine shaking hands with, Gemini or Claude or DeepSeek. So this is a very new area, but it's moving extremely quickly. OpenAI now has a robotics team.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:14:09]:
Figure just showcased an advanced humanoid. So the technology is moving, extremely quickly.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:14:18]:
Mhmm. Who are your primary competitors and what differentiates OpenMind in this space?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:14:27]:
Generally, most people think about hardware or robotics as closed ecosystems. So you generally try to lock down the system the software and the hardware and then sell the final product like a Roomba vacuum cleaner, But the success of Android as a open source software for phones gives an example of, how open source competitors in some situations can be viable. So what we're doing with our software is we've open sourced the whole thing. So if you want to build an advanced robot capable of having a conversation with you and exploring your house and doing things for you, you know, have a starting point for building the software that that does that. So one key difference is that we're open source. Of course, there's ways we make money, but the core software is open just like Android is. So, as a mental model, we think of ourselves as Android for robotics, or a land chain for robotics, and both of those have open source core with enterprise product and capabilities wrapped around that.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:15:45]:
Could could you highlight some current market trends and data that supports your mission?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:15:53]:
Oh, that's a great question. In terms of market trends, one area we're seeing move quickly is elder care, where many old people's homes, for example, are interested in technologies to engage people much more frequently and have them smile more and be happy And that's a that's a, like, long conversation to have what we think about that and if that's a good idea. But, that's one area I'm seeing more and more pilots of robotics being tried out in a social or health care context. And there there's a lot to unpack in that kind of business. What do you sell? Who do you sell to? What are the economies of scale and things like that? But that's one area, the sort of hospital elder care area that seems to be moving quickly. And at CES this year, there was another class of robots that got a lot of attention. These are humanoid sex robots. Apparently, the CES booth this year, featuring those technologies was was well attended.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:17:18]:
So, perhaps, you know, not surprising, if you have a robot that is, very good at emotionally engaging individuals, then, it doesn't take too much to foresee, sort of interesting new, sort of interesting new markets. As you know, the best way to make money in AI is to program AI girlfriends. So, the technology is showing itself very capable at, durably engaging with lonely humans, and then the ability of having, you know, that software run around in your house and do other things that could be very interesting.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:18:00]:
Mhmm. I see. One shouldn't actually be surprised to see such a lot of, interest in sex robots given what large share of the Internet is made up of pornography. So
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:18:13]:
Absolutely. It's it's not a surprise. And, of course, that was one of the main drivers of building out the Internet, being able to deliver large amounts of video. And, you know, it it wouldn't be surprising if, the sort of sex industry is actually one of the areas that also, drives adoption or drives development of relatively low cost humanoid form factor robots.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:18:37]:
Mhmm. I see. Before we get into product and innovation and deep dive, we'll have a little break for our advertising clients. Let's go into product and innovation. I'm here with Jan Liphardt, founder of OpenMind. Could you walk us through OM one's core functionalities? If you had a whiteboard, how would you illustrate its architecture?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:19:10]:
Oh, the the architecture is very similar to the human brain. When people think about the brain, they think of it as maybe this almost magical object, but in reality, it's a wet massively parallel electrochemical computer that has a modular architecture. So for example there's regions of your brain that are solely devoted to moving your eyes towards the area of maximum classification uncertainty and you don't even notice that. You you don't think about oh I should move my eyes to look at this thing. I don't know what it is. Your brain does that automatically and that's a sort of modular functionality and our software as well is composed of modules that focus on different types of sensors. These are audio or vision or lidar or pressure or GPS, so that gives the system information about its surroundings. All of that information is turned into natural language, and the natural language coming from all the different sensors is then fused into a paragraph, and that paragraph is a description of the world around the robot.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:20:27]:
That paragraph then flows to a large language model, which then generates a series of voice and speech and movement outputs. A lot of people think a lot of people that have programmed robots before typically do something called end to end AI, and that involves collecting a large amount of information and training models on that information. But then what you're left with are models that are extremely specific. For example, you might end up with a good model for a car or a cat or a dog, But then it's very difficult to convert your car to a radiologist, to a cat, to a cook. How do you do that? Do you then go back and collect ten million hours of cooking videos and retrain a new cook model or a doctor model. Our position is that that's the wrong way to do things. Our position is that you should be using prompt engineering to change the behavior of a large language model and for example in our system because we're large language model based at the core of the operating system, we can convert a dog to a cat by changing a single word in the prompt. We tell the software you're a cat period and then the dogs now think they're cats and they will run away from dogs because they're internally convinced they're a cat and we didn't have to retune, rebuild, re parametrize any model.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:22:10]:
We made a single word change and what we're relying on there technically is the fact that Sam at OpenAI has already taken essentially all public information that's available and represented that public information as a large language model. And contemporary large language models have a very good understanding of what it means to be a doctor, a dog, a cat, or a cook, and we can use all of that information for free. This is probably where a lot of robotics is going, at least for universal robots. The technology is not so applicable for manufacturing where you have very specific things you want the robots to do, but it is extremely powerful for making universal robots that have a broad array of different functions and can be almost immediately converted from one persona, a doctor, to another persona, a cat, with a single word change.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:23:15]:
That would be pretty cool. The the I've I've I've I've we already know that your kids used your RoboDocs to help them, do math homework. Have you encountered any other surprising uses of your o m one in unexpected ways?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:23:36]:
Well, that's the one, I've seen sort of most close at home sort of sitting at sitting at the dining table and Ben is doing his math homework and he just asked the dogs hey like do these square roots for me and the answer is just come right back. In terms of other things I've seen that's interesting is when the dogs are walking around where I live in Los Altos, which is a little village and there's cafes and there's people outside on the sidewalk. The thing that always fascinates me is how much kids like the robots. Like every single kid comes running even if they can only just crawl, they'll come over and and have a look And I think that has to do with, natural curiosity that kids have for animals. And the same is true also for robots. So we've had many situations where, you know, the little toddlers come up and they hug the dog and they drool on the dogs and they're super curious. And then, their parents, typically are a little bit more afraid. The parents will will, you know, they're they'll, they're scared that their kid is closely interacting with the robot.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:24:50]:
They don't quite know how it will behave, so they're a little bit more suspicious. The thing that really surprises me is how quickly humans become attached to robots that are running suitable software. So my suspicion is in the future that any kind of stereotypes we have about robots, you know, it's just like they're dumb, they're a piece of technology, they're you can turn them on or off. A lot of those things will be very quickly replaced with, pretty strong emotional connections with robots in your home, and you will treat them like, family members, like your dog or friends or things like that.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:25:35]:
Interesting things to think about. I would be interested because you talked about so much changing doc to cat and so on and so forth. But beyond its features, what experience or feeling do you aim for users to have when interacting with OM one?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:25:58]:
Well, that's another fascinating question that relates to a very, very quickly growing area which is called empathetic AI. And the whole point of empathetic AI is to be something that humans like interacting with. People are optimizing the duration of chats, So the goal of empathetic AI is to generate AI is that humans like to talk to for long periods. The numbers in the industry right now are approaching an hour and a half. So some of these chatbots are so good that humans have a great time talking to them for more than an hour. And in terms and with respect to OM-one, the software we're building, we're not building individual modules like empathetic AI. We're much more interested in in tools that allow you to integrate all of those AIs and a typical robot these days has something like five to 10 different AIs running simultaneously, and those pieces are interacting. So we're we're on an engineering side.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:27:09]:
We're much more at the sort of multi agent, physical embodiment level than we are about optimizing individual modules. But from in terms of your question in terms of what we like the robots to do, we certainly want compelling speech with low delay, and we want the Robot to look at the human, and we want the Robot to have at least one way of indicating emotional state. That could be a small display or it could be changing the color of the robot's head. So, we've started to integrate, color panels in the robot's head so it can show to you if it's sad or mad or angry by changing the color of its head. And so then people want to, associate, you know, the head is green, things are good. If the head is, like, yellow or red, your your robot is mad or sad or something like that. So we want the robots to be able to deliver a compelling combination of inputs, that give people this degree of, sort of emotional connection to the technology.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:28:23]:
That is quite interesting. I I just just playing around in my head when I will see the first artificial dog running around in our house. I I can tell you that my, wife is not a fan of a real, biological dog, but maybe in the future, I can convince her of a of a Robo dog.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:28:43]:
Yes. We we can in in a few months, we'll send you one. And, so, so then you can directly, help improve the software. And by virtue of it being open source, you'll be able to look inside the software and trust it more, because by virtue of being open, we can't hide any nefarious things in the software, software, like stealing all your video data or all your audio data from your home. You'll, at least in principle, be able to, see what's going on inside the software. So, so, yeah, we should talk about, sending you one. We're currently building a smaller form factor because the current dogs that are about 15 to 20 kilograms, are still quite dangerous, and they can punch a hole in your wall. They can also jump about, two meters.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:29:38]:
And, but for normal household use, you don't really need that, and a smaller lighter form factor is probably less scary and better.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:29:49]:
I see. The only confidential thing that I would have here, in in our apartment are very likely my cooking recipes.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:29:58]:
Well, yes. Sorry to say, your cooking recipes are at risk. And so if you have anything, super secret from your your Omar, then, you should please hide that properly.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:30:11]:
I will. I will. Can you share some, or do you already have some real world case studies that showcase the impact o m one has?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:30:23]:
Well, given that we've only started in, August and given that we just open sourced the software a few weeks ago, the main use we're seeing right now is, by developers at different hackathons. So they're just at the point where they're becoming familiar with the software, learning to use it, and building little prototypes for different use cases. And so hopefully soon, I'll have more specific examples to give. But it's certainly true that robots in general are, are finding success in many, many different use cases. A great example would be Ukraine, where, of course, the benefit of a dog or quadruped form factor is that you can much more easily, navigate mud and fields. And, also, for example, if you want to hunt tanks, one obvious way of doing that is to attach an explosive to a quadruped dog, and the dog can then hunt the tank, of course. You can just tell it, you know, go chase the tank. But as noted, we're staying away from the defence sector completely.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:31:42]:
That's something that's being very well handled by a quickly growing sort of defence robotics sector, including friends of mine who recently left their jobs at the Bundeswehr to, focus focus full time on, defense focused hardware.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:32:03]:
It's very easy to get a dog chase a tank because you tell you tell the robodog the tank is now a squirrel.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:32:10]:
Precisely. Yes. In the prompt, you say, you know, you're you're you're a dog and, you love chasing tanks. You, of course, have to make sure that you're a little bit more specific about what kind of tanks chase, But then, yes, but then you're good.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:32:28]:
Let us go a little bit into the business small line growth strategy. But before that, something just popped into my mind. When you could do, having a dock somewhere in a remote place hard to access and you could put explosives on it. Would it also be possible to have dogs maybe even stationed at some remote places? What I have in mind is, like, shelters somewhere in in the mountains or stuff like that. We had traditional, you know, Bernardino De San Bernard dogs who run around looking for people, something like that. What I had in mind was a a dog, with the first eight pack and, a defibrillator attached in a weatherproof, package on the back.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:33:14]:
That's brilliant. Jeroen, what are you doing for the next few months? Come here and help us build that.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:33:23]:
Happy to do so.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:33:25]:
And, that's a great idea. And that basically would involve, having the quadruped in a sort of nice, like, Styrofoam container that's easy to deploy. You would have charging electronics that make sure that the quadruped is ready to go when needed, and then it could be remotely activated. And the styrofoam shell would open, and the dog could stand up and, perform, perform various duties as as you program them. The battery life right now is about three hours, and so you'd have to think about, like a charging infrastructure and communications infrastructure. We've used, Starlink, for communications to the dogs, and that makes it possible to connect with them basically anywhere on Earth and have a pretty good telemetry and video data, using the small form factor, Starlink system. So the the Earth two satellite communications are getting, very good very quickly. And so that means that what you just described could easily be built.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:34:40]:
And, come here. We will host you. We will give you hardware and access to the lab, and let's go build it together.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:34:48]:
That that would be very, very good. We need to seriously talk about that after the interview. But before that, let us let us go a little bit into the business model and growth strategy. What is the primary revenue model driving OpenAI driving OpenMind? Sorry. Again, model, we cut this out. Business model and growth strategy. What is the primary revenue model driving OpenMind?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:35:15]:
Well, right now, there's a major question in the entire AI industry, which has to do with how do you monetize AI. So the question you're asking is a bigger one and the same question can be asked of robotics how do you monetize robotics. What we're seeing is that as it relates to monetizing AI, people or companies who have many customers and existing products have a natural advantage because they can use AI to make existing products better and then charge existing customers more. That's an easy way to monetize AI. If you're a company that's developing AI itself, that's of course difficult to do because you don't have a lot of existing sales channels or customers yet. One thing we're doing as a company is we're speaking more and more to robotics hardware manufacturers with the goal of developing partnerships with people who make robotic hardware, and the value proposition is that many of these robotics companies don't necessarily have advanced capabilities in software or AI, and, of course, want their robots to be competitive. So So one thing we're looking into is partnerships with robotics companies, and the other thing, we're doing on the, on the revenue side is we are putting up enterprise focused, products that enterprise pays for. So when you start using our open source software, then the very first thing you'll need is a good system for simulating your new robot, ideally digitally.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:37:10]:
So, one enterprise product is a digital simulator for the robot you're developing and that allows you to quickly iterate through different robot designs by virtue of being able to evaluate your robot design interacting with the digital world on a computer. That's one example of a sort of enterprise product. The other enterprise product we're building is a communication infrastructure for robots and the idea is that robots are much better able to quickly learn and transmit that information to other robots to help their robot friends. That means that if you have a swarm of robots, they can transmit information and skills very quickly to all their partners in their team. For that communications infrastructure, that will also be a pay per use infrastructure just like people pay for cell phones. But in this case, robots will be paying for machine machine communications, infrastructure. But the main thing for us right now as essentially any company in, this space is to just be used, is to get users, to have people use our software, and then once you figure out what people are using the software for, then it's also easier to develop good revenue models. But we're really just emphasizing on growth right now and adoption as opposed to, what specific product features are or how much to charge for them.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:38:53]:
Mhmm. Jan, should we tell should we ask our audience kind of, crowdsourced intelligence? How do you guys envision OpenMind expanding its reach? Comment down below here. Let's talk a little bit about fundraising and financial sustainability. Fundraising often comes with highs and lows. Could you share a defining moment of open OpenMind's fundraising journey?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:39:24]:
Well, I guess one one thing that's really important for founders to know is that, there are many good ideas, but the way investors work can be very surprising. And generally what happens is that there are some trends in the investment community, and if your idea conforms to that trend, then your fundraise will be very easy. Conversely, if your idea is excellent but the timing is bad, then your fundraise will be extremely difficult or impossible. So it's a little bit like, you know, fashion in Italy or Paris, where the fashions change every few months. So a big part of successful fundraising is just getting the timing exactly right or being very fortunate that you're working on something that is broadly perceived by the investment community to be potentially really interesting, and then you're not too late and not too early. In our case, I think through dumb luck, our timing was just very good. People were seeing the rapid advances in AI, and when we started to tell people, oh, you know that AI is not just good for students cheating on their homework, or we're missing human lawyers, AI is also good for controlling robots, and then they said, oh, I haven't heard that before, tell me more. And so then that's a very natural starting point for a conversation.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:41:07]:
And then based on previous startup experience, people just asked if they could send us money. And so at some point, we just said, oh, okay. Let's, let's turn this into a company and just, take the money. But, that, but the most important thing there is just to get the timing right.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:41:30]:
Mhmm. I see. How do you balance between rapid growth and financial sustainability?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:41:41]:
Oh, you don't. Yeah. You just, you just try to
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:41:47]:
build Next question.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:41:51]:
Yeah. No. You try to build the most awesome product and then, like, grow like crazy. And then when you need money, you just raise more money. If you can't, you're building the wrong product.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:41:59]:
Doesn't get any simpler. How have investors respond responded to your business well, and what strategies have you employed to make your pitch stand out?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:42:10]:
Well, to first approximation, investors don't ask about the business model. So what investors, are more concerned about are things like, are you building something that is new and useful? Can you protect the business, whatever it is? What is the maximum addressable market? Is the TAM a billion or is it a trillion? And those are the important questions. And then specifically what your business model is and what you're gonna charge for and how much you're gonna charge. All of that stuff is made up anyway and fake because you basically don't know. So the questions you get at least in the early stages, of a start up really have to do more with how special is your technology, does it solve an important problem, and what's the addressable, market size. Of course, if the company is larger and you've been operating for years, then, of course, you have to show the dollars and cents. Are you actually making money? How much does it cost to acquire each new customer and so forth? But, given that we've been going for less than a year, we're still, at this very, very early stage, you know, 15 people, and, we we do not have to show any revenue at this point.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:43:37]:
Mhmm. We already talked about team and leadership here, but since you're very young and you're a small team, I would just stick to very few questions there. What do you think the are the core values that define OpenMind's company culture?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:43:57]:
Well, the the central thing I look for in any employee is, great enthusiasm and extreme flexibility. In a startup, there is no such thing as a defined job role or a clear job description. The job description is very easy Work 20 fourseven and get things done, and your title and your background and your interests, none of those matter in the least. The point for you is to be completely driven and utterly fascinated by what you're trying to do and then just get things done. And some people flourish in that environment and other people struggle greatly. For example, we've seen this is true of many startups that people who have worked at large companies have an incredibly difficult time joining a small startup because they tend to be used to structure and rules and standard operating procedures and eight levels of decision making. And so when someone like that joins a startup and you tell them like, I don't care what you call it. I don't care what your job title is.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:45:16]:
Just, like, go do it. Figure it out. So you're looking much more for a skill set that is like a, like a Swiss army knife, like an extremely enthusiastic Swiss army knife more than you are about people for highly specific roles.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:45:37]:
And if some some highly enthusiastic Swiss Army knife is listening right now, where could they learn more about career opportunities at Open Mind?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:45:47]:
Oh, they should just email me, Jan, j a n, at open mind dot org. It's an amazing time, it's an amazing once in a life opportunity, there's unlimited money, and there are an amazingly large number of entirely new things to be built. So come to California, get on an airplane, and let's talk.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:46:12]:
Getting a little bit into regulatory, ethical, and societal impact as OpenMind scales, what ethical considerations come into play and how do you address them?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:46:24]:
Well, that's the topic of a whole book and the the the main thing is that the technology is moving much more quickly than most people realize. So what's really missing is just awareness of what the capabilities of the software are and a broader societal discussion. I certainly have opinions, but my opinions only matter a tiny tiny tiny little bit. What's much more important is that there is a broad discussion around these topics and that's part of the motivation behind podcasts like this. In terms of ethics, I think all engineers and all scientists certainly are responsible for foreseeable consequences of technologies they've developed. And there's no way we're going to be able to scrape the surface of any of this in the remaining two minutes. But as a parent, I have to say I am very afraid of what some of these technologies mean for, like our children. What shall they learn? What kind of jobs will they have? What will their families look like? What will their income be like? What does a democracy look like? What does a society look like? And all of those things are potentially impacted, by the technologies that the AI community is working on.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:47:52]:
So everyone listen to this. Please wake up, please learn, and please argue.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:47:59]:
That that is actually so since you already hinted, we only have two more minutes of recording time. I would have a lot more questions for you. But, to, for our listeners, if you had the chance, what question would you post to Jan? Share in the comments. And, Jan, to you, as as a last question, where can our listeners connect with you and learn more about OpenMinds initiatives?
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:48:27]:
Well, hopefully, there'll be, a link, or something like that in your podcast. But, website is at openmind.org. And we're working hard to, add more material and to, have more interesting content there. And, of course, we're also on, Twitter and all the other places. So, let's just start with the website at openmind.org.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:48:55]:
Great. Jan, it was such a pleasure having you here. We talked a lot, and I think I'll have you back for another interview with very interesting content.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:49:04]:
Wonderful. It's been a pleasure. I look forward to seeing you in California at some point, and there's a dog on the way for you.
Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:49:12]:
Great. Thank you. Have a good day. Bye bye.
Jahn Liphardt | Founder OpenMind [00:49:15]:
Thank you, Thank you. Bye bye.
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