Scale like Amazon: How Jeff Wilke is Rebuilding USA Manufacturing

John Giannandrea is the former Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy at Apple, and former head of Search and AI at Google. Earlier he worked at General Magic and Netscape, and was CTO of Tellme and of Metaweb, which Google acquired in 2010. John joins Brad Porter, who worked for him at Tellme, to talk about ideas that arrive 20 years too early, the day he saw the web and quit his job, why skeptics are a good sign, and how to know when an AI system that is never 100% right is ready to ship. The conversation ultimately points toward a future where the next leap in AI comes from better architectures and a deeper understanding of the models, and where the teams that win, in software or robots, set a launch bar, ship into real work, and keep climbing. 0:00 Intro 1:33 From Scotland to Silicon Valley: Inmos, Pixar, and SGI 4:15 General Magic: building the iPhone 15 years too early 5:18 Seeing Mosaic, quitting, and joining Netscape as employee #20 8:42 AOL buys Netscape and the move to Tellme 11:43 Open-sourcing the browser: the road to Firefox 13:32 Metaweb, Danny Hillis, and building the knowledge graph 17:54 How Metaweb disrupted Google Search 21:57 Google's AI second act and the $15K espresso machine 24:41 Leading Google Search: a policy job, not a technical one 27:23 Leaving Google for Apple: two opposite cultures 31:48 Hill climbing: how ML features get to launch 33:26 Beyond data and compute: the next architecture breakthrough 35:08 Physical AI and why more data isn't enough 36:56 Privacy, Apple Intelligence, and Private Cloud Compute 40:08 Shipping LLMs: Siri, Gemini, and ChatGPT's surprise hit 41:24 AI risk: what Geoffrey Hinton actually worries about 42:41 The Vatican cardinal and the "200-year experiment" 44:35 Was the internet a good thing? Building with humanistic intent 48:50 Young people, search, and the hunt for truth 50:52 AI is dual use: society will adapt and regulate 52:43 US vs. China and the global talent race 55:55 Overhyped short term, underappreciated long term

Swami Sivasubramanian is VP, Agentic AI & Emerging Technologies, AWS. He joined Amazon as an intern during his PhD, worked on Dynamo, and went on to launch DynamoDB, SageMaker, and Bedrock; his organization now builds Kiro, Bedrock AgentCore, Quick Suite, and AWS Transform. Swami joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about the gap between AI assistants and AI agents, what it means to be on the loop rather than in it, and how Amazon rewired the way it works: one agent for a company-wide Java upgrade, a demo in a week before the PR/FAQ, and no more version 30 of a doc. The conversation ultimately points toward a future where the models are no longer the constraint and the organization is: the teams that pull ahead stay on the loop, decide in days instead of months, and put deterministic guardrails around probabilistic agents.

Brad Silverberg is a founder and advisor at Fuel Capital, and before that he spent the 1990s at Microsoft, where he led MS-DOS, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Internet Explorer, and grew Windows from roughly a $50 million business into a $3.5 billion one. He was PC Magazine’s Person of the Year in 1995, and he arrived at Microsoft by way of software research at SRI in 1978, the Apple Lisa team. Brad Silverberg joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about why the Lisa and the original Mac were brilliant and still struggled commercially, how he shipped Windows in deliberate steps with Windows 95 in his head from day one, and how Internet Explorer came from two or three percent share to winning the browser before Microsoft gave the lead away. The conversation ultimately points toward a rule that outlives any single platform: platforms are won not by the best idea but by whoever sequences the hard problems correctly, and they are lost more often to the politics inside the building than to anything a competitor does.

Erik Nieves is the co-founder and CEO of Plus One Robotics and a 25-year veteran of Yaskawa Motoman, one of the industry’s largest robot makers, where he ran the technology group. Since founding Plus One in 2016, he has focused on vision-guided robots doing real parcel work for the big couriers, a fleet that has now passed two billion picks. Erik joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about the distance between a robot demo and a real deployment, what it takes to sell automation to companies a thousand times your size, and why a human in the loop still keeps the robots working. The conversation ultimately points toward a future where progress comes less from how robots move than from how well hands and eyes work together, built by engineers who have lived with the problem on the operator’s side. Also, check out the live stream response to Figure's Demo! https://bit.ly/4czQ37G

Russ Tedrake is a renowned roboticist, MIT professor, and founder and CEO of Walden Robotics. After decades of advancing robot locomotion, manipulation, and AI—including influential work with humanoids and the DARPA Robotics Challenge—he is now focused on bringing intelligent robots into real manufacturing environments. Russ joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about leaving the lab for the factory floor, the practical choices behind robots that can work today, and what the physical AI boom could mean for the future of manufacturing. The conversation ultimately points toward a future where robots don’t simply replace individual tasks, they help factory workers and production engineers improve entire systems faster than ever before. 0:00 Intro 2:00 Lessons from Atlas: deforming legs and broken hands 6:30 Kung-fu humanoids: entertainment vs. real-world value 8:20 The real world is the ultimate eval — and the Walden pitch 11:30 Humanoid or not? Wheeled base, grippers, and safety cases 15:30 Why floors matter: flatness, wear, and messy facilities 19:20 Generality and embodiment: how much does morphology matter? 22:50 What data is actually salient? Filtering and noisy data 26:50 Challenges as evals: the Amazon Picking Challenge and its alumni 29:00 Capital, bubbles, and whether this time is different 31:00 Reshoring, export rules, and the logistics engine 33:40 Tips for founders and Chesterton's fence 36:10 Factories are dynamic: co-evolving with robots 37:20 The metronome effect and compounding automation gains 41:15 Vibe coding the factory floor and the Toyota Production System 45:30 The vibe at MIT, and closing