← Decoder with Nilay Patel
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- [00:01]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Support for this show comes from Adobe Acrobat. We all know sending a file is easy. Making sure your clients understand the file is the hard part. But with PDF spaces and Adobe Acrobat, you can give your clients the full picture with custom intros, audio summaries and a helpful AI assistant. So if you want to stop the endless follow ups, do that with Acrobat. Need to make your docs crystal clear? Do that with Acrobat Want to make sure your clients get everything they need to hear? Do that with Acrobat. Learn more@adobe.com do that with Acrobat
- [00:39]
Nilay Patel
Support
- [00:40]
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- [01:52]
Nilay Patel
Hello and welcome to Decoder.
- [01:53]
Neil Apitel
I'm Neil Apitel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Wasim Bensayed, the chief software officer at Rivian and the co CEO of Rivian's platform joint venture with Volkswagen, which everyone just calls RV Tech. That joint venture kicked off about a year and a half ago with a nearly $6 billion investment from Volkswagen, and it effectively puts Wasim in charge of the operating system and electrical architecture for every future EV from Volkswagen and its associated brands, including familiar names like Audi, but also new companies like Scout. There's a lot of decoder ideas in there. I really wanted to know how that joint venture works and how it's structured to preserve Rivian's unique software culture, which you'll hear Wasim talk about is the core element of the entire thing. I also wanted to know where the lines were, what parts of Rivian software get to be just for Rivian, and which parts of the core technology are shared across both the smaller company and the behemoth that is Volkswagen Group. And of course I wanted to understand how Wissim navigated the tension between the two. You know, classic decoder bait. It's also a big moment for Rivian in general. Right now, the company is gearing up to deliver the more affordable Rivian R2, which is the first vehicle based on this new architecture. And the company also just shipped the AI powered Rivian assistant in its R1 vehicles. You'll hear Wasim talk about the Assistant is the beginning of a big bet for Rivian as it tries to create a more agentic software platform in its cars. I actually got to spend some time with the Rivian assistant in an R1S ahead of my conversation with Wasim, and I found it to be a fascinating experience and certainly powerful and engaging, but at the same time it's frustrating in a lot of really interesting ways. So of course I had a bunch of feature requests, bug reports and questions about the future of AI and assistance in cars. We talked about his prediction from just a few years ago that buttons in cars were just an anomaly, and of course how he's feeling about Android Auto and CarPlay these days. You'll hear it. But spoiler alert, don't get your hopes up. This is a really fun episode of Decoder. It's really in the weeds of a lot of my favorite things to talk about. Okay, Wasim Bansayat, chief software officer at rivian Co CEO of RV Tech here we.
- [04:04]
Nilay Patel
Well, Sin Ben said you're the chief software officer at Rivian. You're also the co CEO of a very important software joint venture between Rivian and Volkswagen, which is just straightforwardly called Rivian Volkswagen Group Technology. Welcome to Decoder.
- [04:17]
Wasim Bensayed
Thanks, Neely. Super excited to be here.
- [04:19]
Nilay Patel
I am very excited to talk to you. I have a lot to talk to you about. It occurred to me as we were doing the prep for this episode that you're in charge of building a new kind of software for cars, but also because of the joint venture in charge of building a new kind of software company that builds the new kind of software for cars. It is the most fractal decoder I think we've ever had.
- [04:39]
Wasim Bensayed
Awesome.
- [04:41]
Nilay Patel
There's a lot here. Let's start with the organization. So you're the chief software officer at Rivian. I think a lot of people understand what that means. You're the guy that they can yell at about CarPlay. Don't worry, we'll come to that. Um, there's new Rivian Assistant, which is an intelligent agent inside the car that I've been playing with that I want to ask you a lot of questions about. Then there's RV Tech, which is the joint venture with Volkswagen. You're building a new zonal architecture for a bunch of cars. I believe the R2 is the first car that's going to run that new architecture. How does that all work? What, what are the lines between RV Tech and your role there? You're the co CEO there and your role with Rivian? And what is the boundary between the software you build in the joint venture and the software you build at Rivian?
- [05:22]
Wasim Bensayed
All right, before we dive into RV Tech and the joint venture, I think it's really important to talk about the overall industry landscape. The automotive industry is really going through a major disruption. The amount of software content in the cars. With technologies like electrification, connectivity autonomy is significantly increasing and that is creating a big divide between traditional OEMs and then new tech forward. Companies and consumers now have really much higher levels of expectations in terms of the overall experience and convenience in the cars. And multiple OEMs have tried really hard to get software content, but it's not easy. It requires a very different type of talent. It requires in some cases really complete cultural change because you're not only developing software, but then you need to adopt different methodologies, different ways of doing things. You need to be much more agile. And when you look at the industry, companies have tried do that in house. Some of them tried to partner, some of them tried to use tier ones and a lot of recipes did not really work. And that was really the genesis of the great partnership that we have now with the Volkswagen Group, which has really taken the Rivian technology stack, taken software, the electrical architecture, the Rivian DNA and culture as well. And then marrying that with the incredible scale that the Volkswagen Group has. And it really provides a fantastic opportunity for both companies. Because now we can have a solution that can not only underpin the Rivian vehicles, as we mentioned, with the R2 as the first car that the joint venture is shipping, but then eventually in the future, every single electric model and the VW Group. And think about it, from your premium cars, an Audi for example, to luxury cars with Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, to the mass market cars. And that suddenly provides an opportunity of scale. But then also it exercises the technology in very different ways and really puts us in a wonderful position so that we can build an architecture and operating system for the entire industry.
- [08:13]
Nilay Patel
So that question of architecture and operating system, it feels very complicated. As you said, the industry is moving to Software defined vehicles, which is a great buzzword. And every car executive that I talk to very clearly has a different definition of what software defined vehicle means. What is your definition of what software defined vehicle means?
- [08:34]
Wasim Bensayed
First of all, I hate that buzzword.
- [08:38]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
You brought it up.
- [08:41]
Wasim Bensayed
Actually, I can't find a better name. So I admit that I'm also using the same in the lack of a better definition. But think about it this way. I mean, when you look at older architecture cars, they're really an aggregation of multiple mechanical components. And then underneath that there's in some cases hundreds of electronic units which are meant, each one of them is meant to do one thing and generally that's actually mirroring the way those cars are built because they are developed using different tier ones and then different suppliers. And in that world, integrating an end to end vehicle feature requires a ton of coordination between many of those suppliers. It requires very long development cycles. And that approach kind of worked in the past when the expectations of consumers were not super high in terms of end to end features in the cars. But I think with the advancement of EVs, with the types of user experiences that the Teslas and the Rivians and the Chinese cars are offering now, that's no longer really an option for any car manufacturer. And I'll give you just a small example. I mean, when you walk to European, and I know you're currently having a Gen 2 quad, you have your Apple, let's say digital key, you walk to the car and then the car will recognize you. And then there's a lighting sequence, and then you get to the car and your entire profile is configured. And then whether it's the seats, whether it's the steering wheel, whether it's the infotainment system, whether it's the H Vac, everything is configured. For you, that sequence is probably just 15 seconds. But doing that in the traditional world requires the coordination of more than 10 different suppliers. You need to talk to the seat supplier, you need to talk to the door supplier, you need to talk to the H VAC supplier, you need to talk to the entertainment supplier, you need to talk to the security system, you need to talk to the cloud, you need to talk to the third party for the digital key. And then just imagine that for whatever reason you want to slightly change that sequence. Then you're going again for another cycle of changes. And this is why that old model really doesn't work anymore. Cars now are integrated systems with what we call zonal computers, and thinks about them as this is general purpose, powerful compute that we place in the middle of the car and they become the centralized brain of the different functions. And then the more software you can move on those zonals, the more it provides a control of those end to end features for the customers.
- [12:02]
Nilay Patel
So this is the pitch that every sort of pure play car startup has been making for a long time, right? The way that the OEMs built cars was done and you shouldn't have of 1200 ECUs from 1200 different suppliers. And that was fine for gas cars that were pretty dumb. Where the only computer was like my old pioneer head unit that had the screen that folded out. By the way, I love that head unit. If you could bring that back, that would be great for me. I have fond teenage memories of my dumb old car with that head unit. Now the whole cars are computers and you expect a lot of things to happen and that integration is too hard. What I would say broadly is that the legacy OEMs have known this for years, right? They have been on their own journey to solve this problem. To cut down on the number of ECUs. I know Jim Farley was on the show from Ford five years ago being like too many ecus we're cut down. And Volkswagen in particular had its own giant project to do this that failed. I think we can now, now there's enough distance. You're a year and a half into the new jv. We can say cariad which Volkswagen had started failed. Why do you think the new JV and the infusion of rivian culture is going to be successful where Volkswagen's attempt to do it on its own did not meet any kind of positive results?
- [13:17]
Wasim Bensayed
You're getting me in trouble.
- [13:19]
Nilay Patel
That's my job. That's what I do here.
- [13:23]
Wasim Bensayed
I think really what I personally appreciate in terms of the Volkswagen group decision is the recognition that developing what is called software defined vehicles requires a complete clean sheet approach. You cannot approach it just by band aids and then just by trying to have some level of software content into the car. And as you said, the Volkswagen group have tried. Actually they have tried twice. But really deep inside there is two things which are really important here. One is you need to have talent who are able to develop true software, not abstracted functions like what the automotive industry are using with things like probably you have heard about Autosar, but like a true hand coded operating system. And then you also need a deep cultural change with really very different way of approaching the car and the overall development. The old traditional model cars are defined many, many, many years in advance. People claim that they know about the software features four or five years in advance. And then it's a very fixed waterfall approach. The way we design cars at Rivian, for example, is we actually really designed a car around the electrical architecture and around software and around the adaptability of software. So software and technology is at the table since very early. It actually impacts the overall packaging of the car. And we really use that platform and that operating system mindset so that we have a car that can evolve over time and that get better and better for our customers. And such changes are so deep. Where really to do it well, you either need to have the right partner or you go with a clean sheet approach. And I think the Volkswagen Group has made the right decision to really partner with Rivian in this case and not only embrace that technology that we built from the ground up, but then also embrace the culture, the approach and then the DNA of Rivian as a company.
- [16:06]
Nilay Patel
How is the joint venture structured? I know you have a co CEO, it's Carsten Helbing, who's Volkswagen CTO. So you're the two co CEOs, how is it structured?
- [16:13]
Wasim Bensayed
Underneath that, underneath that there's a technical team. So software engineering, electrical engineering, the technical team reforced to me. And then Carsten is my partner in crime. He takes care of the operations and then he's also the main interface to the Volkswagen Group. There's a ton of complexity in terms of managing different requirements, different inputs from the brands, really doing all that arbitration so that we continue pushing towards a platform approach and then we reduce the overall complexity of the portfolio that we're supporting with the BW group.
- [16:52]
Nilay Patel
So one of the questions I have here is you described it as an operating system. It seems like a good framework. People understand what operating systems are. I realize car operating systems are vastly more complex than people give them credit for, but it's an operating system. Then there's expressions of the operating system. And I know that, you know, our audience, they think of the software on the car and they think of the infotainment screen and that's it. That's just one expression, right? The user interface that Arivian is running, there's going to be other expressions for Volkswagen, for Scout, I presume, for Lamborghini, all running the same core operating system expressed in different ways. That is a real push and pull dynamic, right? Where do the features live? Who gets to build what feature? What are the core capabilities of the operating system and the platform versus what does Lamborghini want that it doesn't want? Rivian to have. How do you make those decisions?
- [17:39]
Wasim Bensayed
Yeah, great question. I mean, really, first of all, I think what's important for us is to clarify the role of the joint venture. So we're responsible of the underlying electrical architecture and then the operating system. And what that means exactly is, I mean, when you look at a modern car today, pretty much every single interaction you have with the car is powered by software. And in lots of cases, you don't realize it. I mean, people tend to associate software to the infotainment, to what they see on the UI and the screen. But there's software everywhere in the car. I mean, the way the car navigates, the way the car drives, the way the car saves energy, the way the car does cabin comfort, all of that is actually managed through software. So the way to think about this is our role is to first of all build an electrical architecture with as less as possible of computers in the car so that we simplify the overall packaging, we simplify the overall bill of materials. This is the brains of the system. And then on top of that, we develop software that the different brands can use so that they express their own identity and think about it in a way where we do 80%, 90% of the hard work. And then we provide customization hooks so that an Audi drives like an Audi, and then a Lamborghini presents a different UI than a Rivian. But then what's happening under the hood, what's happening behind the scenes is based on the same platform.
- [19:20]
Nilay Patel
When you think about that underlying electrical architecture and zonal computers, and we're going to cut down the number of computers, but have fewer, more powerful computers. One of the things that it seems like an obvious opportunity for Rivian and maybe way more complicated for Volkswagen, is that you have a big battery that can just power those computers all the time. They can be online, they can be functional, they can be available. Volkswagen also makes gas cars and hybrids. There's some pendulum swing in the industry between electrics and gas vehicles, particularly here in the United States. Is that a challenge or are you just not thinking about their gas cars at all?
- [19:55]
Wasim Bensayed
The scope of the joint venture for the time being is really powering all the electric vehicles. I mean, this is the agreement that we have with Volkswagen. And honestly, a big part of it is one of the main reasons, personally, I joined Rivian is I joined Rivian for the mission. And I think the joint venture provides us with an extraordinary opportunity so that we can get this technology to accelerate electrification into many more cars around the world. One of the first products that we're building with Volkswagen Group is the ID one, which has taken our technology to a mass market vehicle. I mean, this is a car that will sell for less than $25,000 and will be opening the technology, opening that rich feature set to many more consumers around the world. Now, can the technology be used for non EVs? Can it be used for hybrids or eyes? Obviously the answer is yes, but for the time being, this is not the priority of the joint venture.
- [21:04]
Nilay Patel
How big is RVTech? How many people?
- [21:08]
Wasim Bensayed
We're about 1,500 people.
- [21:11]
Nilay Patel
And then how is that split between Rivian folks or Volkswagen folks? Are they. Do you have, is it employees of both companies or are they employees of RVTech?
- [21:20]
Wasim Bensayed
They are employers of RVTech. Actually we started with about 800, 900 developers coming from Rivian and then we had about 50 colleagues who joined us from the Volkswagen Group. And then the rest, this is developers and engineers that we hired in the past 18 months. So everybody's architect.
- [21:48]
Nilay Patel
The reason I asked that is you mentioned at the very beginning that it's an infusion of Rivian's culture, but now they're not Rivian employees. But then you are also the chief software officer of Rivian. How does that culture persist if the thing is its own entity and it's not as directly connected to Rivian or they're not Rivian employees?
- [22:05]
Wasim Bensayed
Yeah, I think the way I probably define my job and probably my priority number one is help the company grow and build on our two main assets. And I think our two main assets is one, technology and two, our people and culture technology. I think we have a wonderful opportunity now by taking that technology into many more cars across a wide range of portfolio and trims. And then culture, that's my daily obsession, which is really making sure that we continue to have the same DNA of agility, being nimble, prioritizing action, quick decision making and really iterating really fast so that we are at the forefront of innovation.
- [23:03]
Nilay Patel
One of the reasons I asked that is, you know, there's Rivian decisions that maybe Volkswagen won't make. Rivian's right now they run Unreal Engine, right? As the graphics and the infotainment. It's really fun. I'm not sure that every single Volkswagen is going to run Unreal Engine. Right? That's a decision that feels like, at least as I understand it, the different brands can make for themselves. But you're the chief software officer at Rivian. You're like, we need better support for the Unreal Engine interface. And then maybe the platform doesn't want that. And you wear that hat, too. How do you reconcile those tensions? Does Rivian's needs always win?
- [23:37]
Wasim Bensayed
What wins is how can we do the software in a way that allows different expressions? And I think in this case, Rivian's interface will show up through Unreal Engine. But then we need to have hooks in our framework. So that to your question, and I know you will ask me that, Volkswagen cars can have CarPlay, and the team will develop that, even though Rivian will not adopt CarPlay. So it's really about creating those different hooks into the operating system so that we allow different ways to express the user interface.
- [24:17]
Nilay Patel
It strikes me, just talking to you about this, that there aren't a lot of models in an industry as big as the auto industry like this, where the. The big player is letting the smaller company define the culture and the opportunity, define the architecture which will define its roadmap in the future. What things have you looked at that are similar that you say, that's successful, we should build the model based on this and operate like this. And what versions of this have failed that you've looked at, where you're like, I want to avoid those mistakes?
- [24:46]
Wasim Bensayed
Yeah, great question. And I think lots of people look at joint ventures, and I think there's probably many more failure stories than success stories. And this has been really one of the guiding principles. And we spent a lot of time discussing with the VW leadership before we engage in such partnership. Now, really what made RJ and myself lean heavily into this partnership is one, the opportunity, and then to the honest and constructive partnership from the Volkswagen Group leadership. I mean, first of all, we are talking about taking the Rivian technology into the second largest OEM in the world. This is by far the biggest licensing deal in the automotive industry. And as RJ and I started the discussions with Oliver Blumer, his number one priority was we need to keep the Rivian way of doing things. We realized that you are bringing not only a software ip, you are bringing not only an electronics ip, but you are bringing a different process, you are bringing a different culture. And we need that change from the inside for the VW Group. And I think across the past 18 months, I mean, obviously in some cases there are daily tensions. I mean, there are cases where, as you mentioned, one brand might request a different requirement than another brand. But what really helped us to continue is that support that we have from the highest levels of the leadership in the Volkswagen Group to really help drive that transformation and that cultural change in the group.
- [26:48]
Neil Apitel
We need to take a quick break.
- [26:49]
Nilay Patel
We'll be right back.
- [26:59]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
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- [29:49]
Neil Apitel
We're back with RIVIAN software chief Wasim Bensayed. Before the break, we were discussing his role as co CEO of Rivian's joint venture Volkswagen and how that organization is structured. Now I want to ask the other decoder question. How does WSIM make decisions?
- [30:03]
Nilay Patel
Let me ask you the other decoder question and I want to turn to the software itself. I ask everybody this question. We've talked about a little bit. How do you make decisions? What's your framework of making decisions?
- [30:14]
Wasim Bensayed
I think the number one rule, I mean obviously my job every day is making decisions. But there's a number of guidelines that I try to apply. First of all, in terms of coaching with my team, I tried to push decisions as much as possible to the lowest levels of the organization. And I think really one of the anti patterns that I see in a bunch of companies where they try to bubble up decisions to the highest levels of executives and that tends to create a culture where things are slow and then employees don't feel really empowered. Now in cases where I personally have to make the decision, few guidelines to the team never come to me with one option. Show that you went through an analysis, have multiple options and then make a recommendation. I want a culture where I empower my team to be really a force of proposal and then come up themselves with recommendations. Now the rule that I use in terms of how much time should I spend on a decision is really is it a one way door decision or is it a two way door decision? If it's a two way door decision then I don't need to spend that much time on it. It doesn't need to be really a hard framework. We don't need to go into an extreme in some cases of collecting tons and tons of data so that we get to a decision. And in some I really just use my gut and I'm a product builder at heart and I know that some of the decisions, even if the data are against me, then I would go with my feeling and in some cases I'm wrong and I'm the first to recognize that. Now if it's a one way decision then that's a different process which requires much more preparation, requires much more data and then arbitration for how we do things.
- [32:13]
Nilay Patel
Give me an example in this context of a one way door decision at RV Tech and a two way door decision.
- [32:24]
Wasim Bensayed
There's multiple of them and I think probably one of them is like leading to broadly the next topic of discussion that we will have, which is our overall approach around AI. And we had a ton of debates internally of whether we should basically just use a third party AI solution or develop our own solution. And there's a ton of tension because you look at the advancements in the AI world and you would think that with everything which is happening, this is obviously a hard problem to solve. Now, it was really clear for me, given the opportunity, given how transformative this is for the entire user experience, that we really need to own our destiny in terms of having a platform that allows us choice, that allows us to change foundation models as we wish, and own that integration layer that allows us to power the entire car operating system.
- [33:42]
Nilay Patel
So this is Rivian Assistant. I've been playing with it for a few days now.
- [33:46]
Wasim Bensayed
What do you think?
- [33:47]
Nilay Patel
Truly had some searching conversations with it, just to push the boundary of what it can do. It's super interesting to have a car where even in the interface it does the wavy line on the main screen. It's very much the car is running its assistant, not an overlay. You can tell the assistant can go and address lots of parts of the car and then there are places where it can't or it won't. And it actually, I think one of the most interesting things about it is that it won't tell you why it can't do things. It is insistent that it won't tell you why it can't do things. Don't worry, I have very specific questions about that. But it strikes me that this is a natural evolution of, okay, the whole car is run by a finite set of computers, and that means our assistant can just run around and talk to those computers and talk to the functions that those computers control in a way that I don't know. If you try to glue an assistant onto, I have a Cadillac ev. If you try to glue an assistant onto that, it has to like, go talk to its ccu. So, like, it's just very obvious that something else is happening with Google Assistant in that car. That's the opportunity. The assistant can talk to the whole car. Then there are places where it just can't for some reason. I'll give you one example. It just struck me as very odd. I was driving in the rain and I said, hey, turn on the back window wiper. And it just won't. And I thought, is that a safety reason? Is that you just don't know how to do it? You're like lost in the zonal architecture. And I asked it and said, I can't tell you why I can't do these things. But here's where the button is, which is really interesting for an assistant, a car to do. It said, I'm not going to do it for you, but the button is on the stock. Push the button. How do you make those decisions in the context of an assistant, of what it can and cannot do?
- [35:27]
Wasim Bensayed
Awesome. So there's a lot of things here. First of all, I think you describe it really, really well. Our approach, our philosophy for the Rivian assistant is not just put a chatbot and then slap it on top of the ui. It's really developing what will become the connective tissue that enables our users to interact with pretty much every single feature in the car. And even more than that, bring their own personal digital ecosystem in the car through the Gentex integration. Now to your question, what it can do and then what it cannot do, us controlling the wiper, it's obviously possible, and I'm sure that you have seen that it can do way more. It can change your drive modes, it can change your ride height.
- [36:16]
Nilay Patel
Right. I could raise and lower the car at 55 miles an hour with the air suspension, which was cool. And it was like the slowest low rider experience you could possibly have. And then I couldn't turn on the wiper. So what is the split?
- [36:30]
Wasim Bensayed
Yeah, and that's honestly, that's one of my favorite features and the way I like to interact with it is I don't tell it to change the ride height. I tell it, okay, give me drive mode with more pep. And then it does it and it changes to sport mode. I mean, this is really the magic of having that true conversational experience. Now, the reason it does not do wiper is by design, we actually block a number of features which are safety related. And cars are obviously homolated, regulated. So everything related to wipers, things related to windshield controls, things related to highway assistance, those are regulated functions which today, through our framework, we block them for safety reasons. And like, safety is really one of the core tenets in how we develop the entire experience.
- [37:20]
Nilay Patel
So the other one that struck me, you know, cars have rear seat sensors. We have kids. So every time I get out of my car, it reminds me there might be a kid in the backseat because it has sensed the weight in the back seat. I think this is one of the funniest sensors any car can have because the car seat is always in the back seat. So it's always reminding me that the kid might be in the, in the, in the car. So I asked it, is anyone in the back seat? And it maybe this is just a bug, but it said, I, I'll find out. And then it said I can't access that sensor. And I said what sensor are you trying to access? And it refused. And I probably had a five minute argument with your assistant about why it wouldn't tell me what sensor it was trying to access. The reason I'm asking this is not because it's a bug or I really needed to know if anyone had car seat at the time. I'm just very curious as you think about building the assistant that can access all of the sensors and the architecture of how that might work and how we might interact with cars. There's just a moment where maybe it's for safety reasons or maybe it just doesn't work right now in the version I have where the LLM has to go talk to another computer and that computer has to give it permission. And I don't know if anyone in any part of the tech industry has figured out exactly how that should work. And I'm just wondering what your point of view is.
- [38:35]
Wasim Bensayed
Yeah, and I think in this specific case it should have actually told you what's in the back seat. So that's a bug that's on.
- [38:41]
Nilay Patel
No, it was like, I'm not telling you what sensor I'm trying to use. And I was like why? And it was like, I just, I'm not going to tell you what sensor I'm trying to get to.
- [38:47]
Wasim Bensayed
Yeah, that one is on me. And I think here is that, I mean we have the team in house and then we'll be able to calibrate that answer and then we'll fix the properly and send you a note here next time.
- [38:58]
Nilay Patel
That's very good. Every time we get a car executive on the show, I just complain about the experiences I have. It's perfect. But that, but that piece where it's, how do you talk to the computer and what permission does that other computer give you? Every assistant at every level is running into that specific barrier and I'm just curious what you think the answer is.
- [39:14]
Wasim Bensayed
Yeah, I mean, pretty much, I think think about our architecture this way. The assistant has deep integration into the entire vehicle operating system. So in theory, I mean with the integrations that we have built, unless we have a bug like the one that you have, you should be able to do everything. The only functions which are not allowed are functions which are safety related because obviously of the homologation reasons. But then also functions where we think that the level of reliability that we can get from the LLMs does not make us comfortable to expose them to the end users. But that's really like the beauty of the internal in house orchestration layer that we have built where we have a ton of guardrails which allow us to control which functions are exposed by the assistant or not.
- [40:13]
Nilay Patel
All right, you mentioned that I was going to get you in trouble. I'm going to get you in trouble again in 2024. You said using buttons in a car is an anomaly of modern design. People love buttons in their cars. So that you got in trouble for saying that. And. But the thing you said was that voice should be the future. Okay, this is the first gesture at voice being the future. Is it good enough? Because, you know, we're right on the cusp of are these things actually good enough to build the kinds of products people want?
- [40:40]
Wasim Bensayed
I think we are on the cusp of something really big. And I deeply believe, like when you think about it, you're in the car, you're driving, you're focused on the road. So in theory, in theory, the primary interface with which you should be interacting with the car is actually your voice. The only reason that drivers and consumers so far did not interact with the car through voice is that like, to put it really bluntly, the technology has been broken. And I think that's really the beauty of what we have now through the technology disruption which is coming with the foundational models. The foundational models are providing us this wonderful opportunity so that we can truly get to a conversational experience and where drivers can interact with the car in human language. I don't need to tell the car, open the front, I can say open the front trunk, or actually I can say, I have a bag in front of the car and it will actually open the front. And I think that completely changes the way you interact with the car. On top of that, we have now the opportunity with all the agentic framework so that we truly can give people their time back in the car. And I hope you tried our Google Calendar agentic integration, but you can imagine how the experience will be in the future where you're driving and then you should be able to perform operations on your calendar, you should be able to perform operations on your email. And then in the future, with the framework that we have with the agent to agent integration, you can actually interact with many more apps from your own digital personal ecosystem.
- [42:37]
Nilay Patel
Can I ask you about the word agentic in this context? So the way the Google Calendar integration works with Rivian Assistant, just describe it quickly for people. It shows you a QR code, you connect your Google Calendar to it, and then Rivian Assistant can like read your calendar, add events, remove events, do calendar stuff. I'm very curious how that's Agentic and how it's built such that the word agentic is meaningful. Because I have like 500 apps over the past 10 years that can do Google Calendar stuff through the standard API. So one, how is it agentic? Is it mcp? Is it something else? And why build it that way versus just doing a bunch of API integrations?
- [43:14]
Wasim Bensayed
I mean, you can actually build it with an API integration. I think the advantage of an agency integration is that you can share the context and then you can perform multiple integrations within the car. And in this case it's based on like, this is an MCP integration which also allows us, I mean, think about it in a way where you can imagine that in the future, instead of having that mono access to every single app on your car, or honestly to that extent even on your smartphone, you can start aggregating and connecting many of those apps through the Agentic framework and have them present a unified user experience. And this is how we're able to connect the navigation to Canada. For example, like I can go to the assistant now and I can tell the assistant, okay, I want to plan a trip from San Francisco to San Diego and I want to have two charging stops. I want them to be close to an Italian restaurant, I love Italian food. The assistant would go and play that and then I'll say, okay, print the summary and add it to my calendar and then send it as a text to my wife. And this type of integrations, when you have behind the scenes, the Agentic framework can really allow many more capabilities which in the future as well. And this is where Agentic can be even further utilized. You can start going into more autonomous functions in the sense that let's say you have an invitation in the calendar with XYZ details and then you can start having reminders saying, okay, do you want to go to this place? Or you're actually really late to your meeting. Do you want me to start preconditioning your car? So that's the beauty of bringing the depth of the Agentic integration.
- [45:29]
Nilay Patel
We need to take another short break. We'll be back in a minute.
- [45:41]
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- [48:51]
Neil Apitel
We're back with Rivian Chief Software Officer Wassim Bensayed, discussing the ins and outs of the company's new AI powered voice assistant.
- [48:59]
Nilay Patel
So I think I understand that, right? You're in your car, it can go access a bunch of apps and services you have. You can take actions across them. You've collected a lot of data in one place. This brings me to a very deep sort of existential question. Whenever anyone talks about ambient computing in this way, where does the logic live, right? The idea that you're going to have that interaction in your car and not at your laptop or on your phone, that seems like a big jump to me, right? The same way that when the smart speaker companies would be like, you're going to talk to your thermostat? And I'd be like, why I'm going to talk to my phone. I don't feel the need to talk to my thermostat in this way. Do you think people are going to do that in the car or are you going to bring Assistant to the Rivian app on a phone? Can you compete with the series and Google Assistants in that way? How is that all going to work?
- [49:45]
Wasim Bensayed
I think actually like the way I think about it, I think it will be both. And I think this is really the big difference between the old world where we had unique applications, and then the new world where we have agentic integrations. And think about the Rivian Assistant as an agent orchestrator, which has privileges because it can deeply integrate with the vehicle controls, with the vehicle operating system. It understands safety, it understand which things to do, which things not to do. And nobody else can develop that better than us because we develop the entire vehicle software. But then at the same time, it has interfaces and connections to other agents. And this is just the beginning. I think. Think about it in a way where in the future you can actually probably be able to bring your own personal favorite assistant and chatbot to the car, and then it can share context with the Rivian Assistant. I mean, this is really the possibilities that this new world, this new type of integrations is allowing us to do.
- [51:02]
Nilay Patel
Is the Rivian Assistant the kind of thing that is possible because of the RV Tech software stack? And is it possible that we'll see the Rivian Assistant or something just like it in Volkswagens as well? Or is this special to Rivian?
- [51:16]
Wasim Bensayed
This is special to Rivian. Everything which is AI stack is developed uniquely for Rivian. I mean, this is Rivian's brand priority. As we see cars becoming more and more AI defined, but we're in discussions so that we can have similar technologies for the Volkswagen game.
- [51:39]
Nilay Patel
Rivians are Sort of famously on lte, when I first got in this car I saw the LTE indicator and I thought, oh, something must be wrong. And I drove around and then I realized it's just lte. Is there any latency concern with that? Especially with voice and going out in the world and doing whatever inference you need to do.
- [51:55]
Wasim Bensayed
So two things. One, we need to get you an R2. The R2 has 5G. There you go, it's coming soon and it's amazing. And then two, and I think you touched base really on one of the architecture considerations for the technology which is when you look at vehicles like the Rivian R1 today, most of the interactions will happen with the cloud. So as you say, it's connectivity dependent and then they will happen best when there's a strong connectivity with the external world. Now there's a number of interactions that happen locally with the car. And if you tell the car I am cold, that interaction is being managed by a small language model that sits directly on the edge. Now the beauty of what will happen next as we get to R2 not only will have 5G, but then Edge AI will be way more powerful and capable on the R2.
- [52:59]
Nilay Patel
On the R2, just to be clear for the audience, when you say edge you mean local, right? It's running locally in the car,
- [53:06]
Wasim Bensayed
meaning that the local computer on the R2 will have up to 200 sparse tops of compute dedicated to AI. I know this sounds like extremely technical, but think about it as this is more capable than some of the self driving platforms today and it's more capable than the amount of AI compute that you have in your smartphone. All of that will be available locally in the R2 car which is coming soon. And that allows as you mentioned, to basically not face such limitations and issues with connectivity but truly get to much lower latencies because a lot of the processing will happen directly on the embedded locally and get to a truly conversation and experience where it's pretty much instant.
- [54:02]
Nilay Patel
Can I just ask you a very, very in the weeds question? We're talking about putting compute in the car. We're going to do some amount of local inference in the car. GPUs are expensive, Ram is expensive. How much of the bill of materials is RJ giving you to do all this in the car versus, I don't know, bigger motors, bigger batteries, how much of the range can you pull off to do local inference in the car? I mean this is kind of the trade off. You're talking about that.
- [54:26]
Wasim Bensayed
Yeah, I mean this is what I love about rj, which is what has always attracted me with rj, is that RJ thinks big things long term and he knows that in this case that the world is moving to AI. And this is why, like the way we do decisions, for example, from a belief material standpoint, it's a very hard process where there's a ton of trade offs all the time. And you can imagine the tension between people wanting to push for a better exterior part and then people wanting to push for a better interior part and then people wanting to have better technology and then we have what we call the fun or the differentiation budget in the car. And rj, absolutely, it was no discussion that we will equip the car with higher inference compute and then higher memory, because this is really the future and it's an opportunity for us to completely reshape the way people interact with their cars. And actually in the long run, to be honest, it solves itself from a unit economic standpoint because as we do more and more interactions locally in the car, we avoid the back and forth with the cloud, so we avoid the connectivity costs and then we also don't have to pay for the inference cost on the cloud. So in the long run it's actually economically positive as well.
- [55:58]
Nilay Patel
That's not just a spreadsheet you made up to win an argument that actually models out kind of. Because I could probably make up a spreadsheet to win an argument. The reason I asked it, because that was my next question, was about inference costs, right? They're going up that there's rate limits at all the big providers. What model are you using right now? What are the frontier models you're using right now?
- [56:14]
Wasim Bensayed
Actually, like the architecture that we have built is not model dependent. So really one of the foundations of the architecture is it allows us to interact and plug and play pretty much with different foundational models. And similarly it can use different modalities in the way users can input their request, whether it's voice in this case. But then it can use vision as well. It can use text if we want to enable that. When it comes to the models themselves, we use currently a combination of internal models for everything that runs locally on the edge. And then we use models from Google, we have partnership with Google. Things are going really well in terms of deep access to the advanced Gemini models as well as the grounding of results, which is also powered by Google.
- [57:19]
Nilay Patel
This is yet another question I asked it to just what are the top five headlines in the Verge? Just to see can this thing browse the Web and it returned some results. They were just, I think they're 24 or 48 hours old.
- [57:31]
Wasim Bensayed
Right.
- [57:31]
Nilay Patel
It was our top five headlines from yesterday. Does this thing have like a web browser in the background or is it just pulling from a Google data corpus? How does that work?
- [57:39]
Wasim Bensayed
It actually can. It should in theory connect real time and then this is where the grounding with the Google results come into the picture. And in theory it should give you the latest headlines. So if it didn't, then that's another one on me.
- [57:54]
Nilay Patel
Well, I was just curious, like there's some, you know, lots of people have this experience now where like the data in the model is old and then there's some cutoff. And I was just trying to find the cutoff and then I had a long searching conversation with it about we need to buy a new air conditioner. And I was just asking it to do math about air conditioner efficiency. This is very boring, but this is what I talked to your car about for a while. And it, I just occurred to me like I am making it think very hard, like where I'm burning token, like I am wasting more energy talking about how efficient of an air conditioner to buy. Like this is not a good, is not a good ratio of energy spent to save energy over here. How does that work? I mean, you have to, you have to pay a monthly fee for the connectivity package to access assistant, but then I might burn way more tokens than that fee could ever pay for. How does that math work out?
- [58:44]
Wasim Bensayed
It really depends. It's a great question. Now obviously in these cases there's all sorts of techniques of what we call rate limiting that we can apply. Like if we have seen in your case that you're spending 20 hours discussing with the assistant, then we may do something behind the scenes, similarly in the way we configure the models. Given the types of interactions that you have in the car, you would not be interacting with the latest and greatest, say Opus 4.7 models so that you burn so many tokens. And then a lot of it also depends on the aggregation across users in terms of the types of requests as well as arbitration that we do between the Edge and the cloud. And as I mentioned, the more we move to Edge and local compute, the better it is for us in terms of overall inference costs.
- [59:40]
Nilay Patel
So let me just ask you this question again. Now that you've shipped the software, people are using it, you're getting extremely detailed feedback from me. Do you still think having buttons in the car is an anomaly?
- [59:52]
Wasim Bensayed
I think I deeply think that voice has the chance to be the primary interface in the car. I also think that buttons can exist, but then they shouldn't be the primary way with which you interact with the car. I think there's much more that is possible through voice where you can not only do one single function, you don't have to go and fiddle with so many functions, you don't have to go even deep into the touch screen to look into specific features. A great voice experience can really elevate all of that and allow users to talk to the car as a human would do and really take the overall experience to the next level.
- [60:49]
Nilay Patel
Are we going to get the H Vac buttons back in any future Rivians? That's really what I'm asking here.
- [60:54]
Wasim Bensayed
Actually, with the R2, we have a great way to have a tactile feedback for H Vac.
- [61:00]
Nilay Patel
Oh, the big paddles on the wheel.
- [61:01]
Wasim Bensayed
Yeah, yeah, they are really awesome.
- [61:04]
Nilay Patel
It's a good pivot. But I'm asking, are we going to get the fan speed button back in the center stack?
- [61:09]
Wasim Bensayed
In the center stack, no. But we have the same in the Halo Wind. It's a great compromise.
- [61:16]
Nilay Patel
You knew it was coming. I have to ask you about CarPlay here because it strikes me just as you, as you imagine this future of the car where it's connected to your calendar, it's connected to all this context. You just, it has autonomy, which is something you're also working on. You get in the car and it knows it's time to go to work and you just say, let's go. And the car takes off driving. This is when you would use like a vast number of applications. Right. This might be when you have the focus to push the buttons again, I'll just make that arcing. But this is when you would want a whole number of apps. And I hear from our readers every time I talk to a car executive. The reason I want CarPlay is because there's 5,000 apps on my phone and no car OEM is ever going to support them on the in the built in infotainment. This is why you would say, okay, project your phone to the center stack. The car's driving itself. Have at it phone projection all day. Do you think that the tide is turning? Are you still absolutely committed to not having CarPlay and Rivian vehicles?
- [62:10]
Wasim Bensayed
I think first of all, it's really important to go through our philosophy of like how we see software in the car and how we see user interface. The challenge with screen mirroring solutions is that they take over every single pixel in the car. And that's not the way we see ourselves interact with our users. You drove our car four years ago and you drove the car in the past few days. And I hope you have seen how much change happened in the car. And that's like truly by bringing the end to end features, I mean not only changing the user interface, but having your navigation know exactly about your drive mode, know exactly about your efficiency. Offering that level of convenience is really what is resonating with a lot of our customers. I mean, even if I look at our own internal statistics, five years ago when we first shipped the R1T and the R1S, the number one request from customers was CarPlay. And at the time, like we do all sorts of survey with customers, more than 70% of customers were requesting CarPlay. In the recent survey, that number is less than 25% now. Because with the level of features that we have shipped to customers, with the level of end to end integration, with the level of convenience that we are bringing, CarPlay or Android Auto to that extent is no longer the topic of discussion. And I think what we're actually seeing right now with the advancement of AI technologies is just another reason why I deeply believe that RJ and Rivian, we made the right choice in terms of investing into our own technology and our software. Cars are moving from, as you said, the buzzy word of software defined to AI defined. And the possibilities that we have now to have such deep AI integration into the car, it will make the entire CarPlay debate in the future completely obsolete. I really believe that the way you interact with apps, which are mono threaded, single buttons, single icons, a lot of that will be now completely reshaped into a world where it will become an agentic integration that presents itself into a wholesome user experience to the user.
- [65:01]
Nilay Patel
I buy that in the big picture, but give me an example of that and I'll just put up an idea that I get from our readers all the time. So for you to react to, there are tons of little apps, they're basically media playing apps on phones and it's trivial to like push the button and do the CarPlay app, the one that I always think about. We got an email from Reader and he said, I have a bible app that is never going to be inbuilt into anyone's infotainment system. It's made by a small developer and I love it and that's why I need CarPlay and I'm always going to buy a car with CarPlay. Because of it. That is about as small of an edge case as you get. But this one customer is going to pick a car based on it. Are you going to, Are you going to make that developer build an agentic AI integration into the Rivian Assistant, or are you just going to lose that customer?
- [65:43]
Wasim Bensayed
I mean, this is the beauty of like the, the technology disruption in which we are today. The answer in that case does not necessarily need to be we will build an agentic integration for that particular app. It can be if it is like say, a Spotify or an Apple Music. Absolutely. But then if it's a small app, the answer to that could be that from the Rivian Assistant, we have an integration to your favorite voice assistant on the car, and then you can ask the voice assistant on the car to play that particular app through Bluetooth Audio. That is possible as we open up the framework and as we allow more integrations to bring your own digital ecosystem to the car.
- [66:28]
Nilay Patel
So you're saying I've got. We'll use Google because Gemini is more present on an Android phone than Siri is currently on an iPhone. So use Google. And they're also your partner. Partner. So you're saying you talk to Rivian Assistant, Rivian Assistant knows about your Google account and your Android phone, and it's going to go talk to Gemini and Gemini is going to go operate your phone and stream Bluetooth audio to the
- [66:46]
Wasim Bensayed
Rivian Assistant in the future. All of that is possible.
- [66:50]
Nilay Patel
Is that better or worse than phone projection? Right. It's. This is like a different kind of loop than just saying put the interface here and let the user doing
- [66:59]
Wasim Bensayed
could be possible through phone projection. I think the challenge with phone projection, again is that, I mean, first of all, you have to go like, as you're driving, you'll have to go through your phone. In some cases you have to press like multiple buttons so that you get to the menu of your own app. The other thing is that it takes over the entire screen and that is a degradation of the experience. Now, is the alternative solution available right now? No, but I think the beauty of the wave of technology in which we are, is that we finally have the building blocks so that we can really redefine those type of interactions and we can allow hooks now into your own personal device through a different way of interaction, rather than truly integrating, end to end, the app app on the car itself or take over the entire screen from your phone. There's a third path now which is possible.
- [68:02]
Nilay Patel
I mean, I obviously, I think it might be easier with Google again, they're your partner. But where would that connection to Google Assistant happen? Would I be like, I don't think I'm holding up my Android phone to the speaker and letting the assistants talk to each other out loud. That. Although that would be fun, I mean, that would be deeply hilarious to hear. The two assistants just have a conversation like, can you please play the music app for me? Does that happen in the cloud? Does it happen locally? Where does that integration point between assistants happen?
- [68:30]
Wasim Bensayed
I mean, think about it as the assistant in the car will know how to talk to your, say, Gemini, your own personal assistant, and then in that case, your own personal assistant will be controlling your phone.
- [68:45]
Nilay Patel
The reason I'm asking this in this way is at some point you have one main assistant and every. All the other things are sort of like agents that can talk to. And then that maybe no one's ever talking to Rivian assistant again. Right? Like, this is kind of the. You pull that thread all the way and Gemini is just doing everything for you all the time. Is that. Is that a danger? Or you would just know? We're close to even having to worry about that.
- [69:05]
Wasim Bensayed
Honestly, we don't worry about that because we know, we. We know the opportunity that we have and we know the level, the. The breadth of capabilities that we can offer. No other assistant will be able to know as much as the Irvine assistant about the car Concord. None. Similarly, the fact that we have the surface of integration sit in our own operating system enables a ton of opportunities in terms of use cases that you cannot simply do with your phone or you cannot simply do by calling another assistant. Like, imagine, okay, I'm driving. And then in. In the near future, we should be able with the technology to have an agentic integration with your favorite food delivery. And then you would say, okay, I. I'm. I need to be. The guard knows exactly when you will be home. You'll say, okay, order my favorite sandwich from XYZ Shop. Your account is already configured. And then the assistant will pick the destination, will get you to your favorite restaurant. All of that is integrated. You just need to do it through one voice command. Like those type of experiences where things become so seamless, where things become so easy, as if you're talking to a human, which connects the dots across multiple surfaces of your digital ecosystem would only be possible through such integrations.
- [70:50]
Nilay Patel
All right, listen, we're out of time here. As you can tell, I can obviously talk to you about this forever. I don't think anyone has figured out how all this works. And it seems like you're making some big decisions. So you're gonna have to come back as you've learned how this goes after this is shipped to all of your customers and certainly when the R2 is out. There is one question that I have to ask every single Rivian person that I encounter. It is very important to me. When is the R3X coming out?
- [71:15]
Wasim Bensayed
It's here. Did you see it?
- [71:19]
Nilay Patel
When can I get one?
- [71:21]
Wasim Bensayed
It's by the way, it's my favorite car. And like, I keep asking RJ that question all the time now. You talked about decisions, you talked about trade offs and us delivering the R2 before the R3X. You can imagine it's a big decision. It's also a hard decision because in our hearts, we all deeply want to have the R3X as soon as possible. Now, we also know that the R2 has the best ingredients to be a wildly successful car. The US needs another alternative for a great SUV for families. And this is what the auto brings. And as we ship the R2, as we scale our volume as a company, we will earn the rights so that we bring fantastic and such emotional cars like the R3s.
- [72:19]
Nilay Patel
I. I know that that is in one way the. The right answer. I'm just saying for me personally, Come on, let's just. Just send me one. It'll be great. That's how I'll give you more feedback. Just like this. I. I will break your R3X prototype in 10,000 different ways. You'll get the bug reports. It'll be great. Tell RJ I. I made the offer.
- [72:39]
Wasim Bensayed
Awesome. I'll get one at the same time as you do.
- [72:42]
Nilay Patel
Sounds good. Well, Sam, thank you so much for being on Decoder.
- [72:45]
Neil Apitel
This is great.
- [72:46]
Wasim Bensayed
Thank you.
- [72:49]
Neil Apitel
I'd like to thank Wasim for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it.
- [72:53]
Nilay Patel
If you'd like to let us know
- [72:54]
Neil Apitel
what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us@decoder the verge.com we really do read all the emails. Or hit me up directly on Threads or Blue sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at Decoder Pod and you can watch clips on TikTok and Instagram, also @dakotapod. That's a lot of fun. If you'd like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcast. Decoder is production the Verge and part of the Boxing Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It's edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The decoder of music is by Brickmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.