Episode Details

The internet was the training set for intelligence

Nobody has built the equivalent for the physical world

Previously, Lucas Ngoo co-founded Carousell, scaled it past $1B 

Now at Cortex AI he's collecting the data robotics labs need to train foundation models

Cameras, VR headsets, glasses on factory workers, retail workers, everyday people. Recording real-world manipulation work (Maybe tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of hours)

Not building the robot. Not training the model. Collecting what goes in

2026: scale data in a big way 
2027+: start rolling robots out, 90% teleoperation, 10% autonomy

While humans step in, the system keeps learning

That's the flywheel toward full autonomy

01:38 Cortex as the data layer for general-purpose robotics
02:19 Why text data doesn’t transfer cleanly to the real world
02:51 Recording day-to-day human manipulation work
03:23 “Tens of millions” to “hundreds of millions of hours” of data
06:37 Cortex’s role: “We are really the data piece”
07:28 When humanoids become part of everyday life
08:00 2026 as the year data scales
08:13 90% teleoperation, 10% autonomy
08:37 Data flywheel toward full autonomy
08:55 Synthetic data + real-world data reinforcing each other