🎧 START pod: Lucas Ngoo, Co-founder & CEO, Cortex AI "The Real World Is the Next Training Ground for Embodied AI"

About this episode

Lucas Ngoo discusses the future of embodied AI and the importance of real-world data collection for training robotics.

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…

People in this episode

Guest: Lucas Ngoo

Topics covered

• embodied AI
• data collection
• robotics
• teleoperation
• autonomy

Keywords

• Cortex AI
• data collection
• robotics
• teleoperation
• autonomy
• real-world manipulation
• foundation models

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cortex AI, Carousell

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