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.

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