Julie Chang (3:28)

How important is this idea of sovereign AI to the future of Nvidia?

Dan Gallagher (3:33)

Sovereign AI is important because it's another potential growth leg for them right now. They've been growing so much, doubling revenue every year for the last couple of years. Investors expect to see strong growth continue for the company. And so much of that is relied on a few very big companies spending a really large amount of money doing that. Capital spending by the companies like Microsoft, Google and so forth, that's continuing. But eventually that's going to get to a point where it levels off and gets to like a normalization. So the fact of having whole countries also become very big customers for Nvidia chips is another potential avenue for growth for them.

Julie Chang (4:13)

So this takes us to earnings. Nvidia earnings are coming out tomorrow. What are you going to be looking out for?

Dan Gallagher (4:19)

Right now there's a lot of worry about Nvidia just because they've already made clear that these chips that they designed specifically for the Chinese market that they thought would be compliant with export controls, they can't sell those anymore. We learned that last month. And so how that's going to impact the rest of their year is kind of a question mark because Nvidia tends not to give forecasts for the whole year. They just tend to forecast for the quarter. So there's a potential that their forecast might be a little disappointing just because they're still dealing with the shut off of this market. The deals that we've been talking, talking about sovereignty ideals and so forth, those are more like mid to longer term things. We don't know how much money is going to be flowing into the near term. So it's going to be an interesting report to see how they try to frame that up.

Julie Chang (5:02)

That was heard on the street columnist Dan Gallagher coming up. Soft and squishy robots How a lab at MIT is rethinking robot design. That's after the break. Isn't home where we all want to be? Reba here for realtor.com the Pro's number one most trusted app. Finding a home is like dating. You're searching for the 1 with over 500,000 new listings every month. You can find the one today. Download the realtor.com app cause you're nearly home. Make it real with realtor.com pros number.

Dan Gallagher (5:40)

One most trusted app based on August 2024 proprietary survey. Over 500,000 new listings every month based on average new for sale and rental listings February 2024 through January 2025.

Julie Chang (5:52)

Everyone these days seems to be thinking of robots as hard, metallic and humanoid. But researchers at one MIT lab are taking a different approach. Lots of different approaches, actually. They're working on robots that are squishy.

Dan Gallagher (6:09)

If you have a hard hand and you don't grip something exactly right, well, it's going to be stuck with that kind of bad grasp. But if you have something that's like really, really soft, if you're a bit in error with what your grasp is, the the silicone actually conforms to the shape.

Julie Chang (6:24)

Robots that swim like those are roughly inspired by actual sea level data and even robots that are edible. Our enterprise tech reporter, Isabel Bousquet visited MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She spoke about what she saw and what researchers there are working on with our colleague Victoria Craig.

Isabel Bousquet (6:46)

So when we think about robots, we tend to lean toward Elon Musk's view of these very hard humanoid style robots. But the ones you've seen are soft and squishy and decidedly not human. What do they look like and what are they made of?

Victoria Craig (6:59)

Historically, robots have either looked like humanoids, metal humans like C3PO, or they've looked like a box on wheels almost. And those are the kind of robots you see in factories, more like the R2D2s of the world. But the director of MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab, a woman named Daniela Ruse, she's really driving this idea that we can think differently about robots. They don't have to be either humanoids or boxes on wheels. She's made robots out of paper, out of food, robots we can eat. She is a proponent of soft and squishy robots, things that can exist in the human world and won't hurt you if you accidentally touch it. One of the really fun things her lab is working on is a sea turtle robot named Crush, after the Finding Nemo character. He's kind of a combination of hard and soft components. So he has silicone flippers, essentially, and he's designed to monitor coral reefs and sea life and swim around. And his flippers are soft so that, you know, he doesn't damage anything.

Isabel Bousquet (8:08)

So are these soft shelled robots mostly used in water or what other use cases do they have?

Victoria Craig (8:16)

Yeah, I mean, they can really be anywhere. The possibilities are really limitless. They're also working on like a soft robotic hand, something that can lift fruit in a grocery store, for example. You may not want a hard metal robot in a grocery store helping you pick out pears or oranges. Daniela Rus's lab, it's focused on a really broad array of things. They've really pionee a lot of the underwater robotics, but they're also working on drones, AKA flying robots. They're also working on autonomous vehicles. They're also working on the humanoids. They're working on robots that will, you know, cook and potentially stir and pour things in the kitchen. Overall, the focus is just on robots that will integrate better with the natural human world. And Danielle told me one of the things that got her into this in the first place was that when she was doing her PhD at corn now she was assigned to design a robot that could pick something up. And it seems like a really simple task, but if you think about just having like your hand being a totally hard shell, it's really hard to pick something up. That's what made her realize that having these soft components on something like a robotic hand is really crucial.

Isabel Bousquet (9:35)

And she's been working on this research at MIT since the early 90s. So this isn't necessarily a new area of study for her or the people there. Isabel, you visited this lab and the testing facility there. What's it like being there and what other kinds of innovation is going on?

Victoria Craig (9:52)

It's totally different from anything I ever pictured. You think about a lab and you think everyone is sitting at a desk inside a room, building something. But we were all over. We were outdoors with the drones in the parking lot, with the self driving car at the pool where there were actual MIT swimmers and lifeguards. So it's expansive, it's a huge facility. It has about 1800 students and researchers at this point. They're also working on the algorithms that will power these robots, power their brains and their movements. She's developed this sort of new type of AI algorithm that she thinks will be better at powering robots than the AI algorithms we currently use. Currently, a lot of the Algorithms we use are inspired by the human brain, which is really complex and really hard to emulate. But she had this idea to create these algorithms that are inspired by the neural networks of worms, because their brains are a lot simpler, but they can still do a lot of things. So she developed these new types of AI algorithms called liquid networks, and she and a couple other researchers actually spun off a company called Liquid AI where they were trying to bring that innovation in the software side into more robots as well.

Isabel Bousquet (11:18)

That's so fascinating. Replicating a worm's brain I don't think would be on anyone's bingo card for research into AI. Would it be to create a robotic worm, or what kind of uses would that kind of thing have?

Victoria Craig (11:30)

No, it's not necessarily that the physical body of the robot would be a worm. It's more that they studied the way that the neurons in a worm's brain talk to each other, and then they replicated that with math. Essentially, it's different math for how the neurons talk to each other. Maybe there could be a robotic worm. They have a robotic eel. They have a robotic rabbit. There is no limit when it comes to sort of the animal world and what they can build with robots.

Julie Chang (12:03)

That was the WSJ's Victoria Craig speaking with our Enterprise Tech reporter Isabel Bousquet. If you want to see photos of the robots, she's got a bunch in her story. We'll drop a link to it in our show notes. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by me, Julie Chang with Deputy Editor Chris Vinsli. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening. Without your data, biz ops become big oops.

Victoria Craig (12:35)

But Veeam's quick data recovery gets you.

Julie Chang (12:37)

Back up to speed, turning panic into poise. Ready to seize the data? Visit us@veeam.com to keep your enterprise running smoothly.