Gary Chen and Conley Oster are co-founders of Raise Robotics - they build mobile manipulators for construction sites, steel fabrication facilities, and shipyards. Environments where the work is genuinely dangerous, the labor shortage is acute, and the dominant solution being pitched to investors right now - humanoid robots - may be fundamentally the wrong answer.

In this episode we cover:

• What it actually feels like to spend a day on a heavy industrial job site
• Why humanoid form factor is the wrong frame for most of these applications
• The self-driving car parallel: we didn't solve autonomous driving by putting a robot in a taxi
• Why "simple" tasks like drawing a line or drilling a hole are deceptively complex
• The tribal knowledge problem - losing the human LLMs built over decades on job sites
• What a job site looks like in 2030
• The shipbuilder who got 2 applicants for "welder" and thousands for "robot welding technician"

Raise Robotics: https://raiserobotics.ai/

The OPTIM Update covers real-world AI, automation, robotics, and AI Infrastructure for founders, investors, and operators.

Subscribe: https://www.optim.vc

Dr. Asad Tirmizi, Co-Founder and CEO of Trener Robotics, breaks down the full lifecycle of AI in industrial robotics.

We cover how models are actually built - the training pipelines, the data, and what separates people who've done it from people who've read about it. Then we get into deployment reality - what happens when AI hits a real factory floor. And we close with the part nobody wants to discuss - how do you actually sell this stuff through integrators and OEMs.

Asad previously worked at Vicarious (acquired by Google) and ByteDance's robotics program. Trener recently raised a $32M Series A co-led by Engine Ventures and IAG Capital Partners to scale their Acteris platform - a robot-agnostic AI skills platform that works across ABB, Universal Robots, FANUC and others.

Learn more about Trener Robotics: https://trener.ai

The OPTIM Update covers real-world AI, automation, robotics, and AI Infrastructure for founders, investors, and operators.

Subscribe: https://www.optim.vc