Deployed: Where Physical AI Gets Real

Swami Sivasubramanian is VP, Agentic AI & Emerging Technologies, AWS. He joined Amazon as an intern during his PhD, worked on Dynamo, and went on to launch DynamoDB, SageMaker, and Bedrock; his organization now builds Kiro, Bedrock AgentCore, Quick Suite, and AWS Transform.Swami joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about the gap between AI assistants and AI agents, what it means to be on the loop rather than in it, and how Amazon rewired the way it works: one agent for a company-wide Java upgrade, a demo in a week before the PR/FAQ, and no more version 30 of a doc.The conversation ultimately points toward a future where the models are no longer the constraint and the organization is: the teams that pull ahead stay on the loop, decide in days instead of months, and put deterministic guardrails around probabilistic agents.

Brad Silverberg is a founder and advisor at Fuel Capital, and before that he spent the 1990s at Microsoft, where he led MS-DOS, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Internet Explorer, and grew Windows from roughly a $50 million business into a $3.5 billion one. He was PC Magazine’s Person of the Year in 1995, and he arrived at Microsoft by way of software research at SRI in 1978, the Apple Lisa team. Brad Silverberg joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about why the Lisa and the original Mac were brilliant and still struggled commercially, how he shipped Windows in deliberate steps with Windows 95 in his head from day one, and how Internet Explorer came from two or three percent share to winning the browser before Microsoft gave the lead away.The conversation ultimately points toward a rule that outlives any single platform: platforms are won not by the best idea but by whoever sequences the hard problems correctly, and they are lost more often to the politics inside the building than to anything a competitor does.

Erik Nieves is the co-founder and CEO of Plus One Robotics and a 25-year veteran of Yaskawa Motoman, one of the industry’s largest robot makers, where he ran the technology group. Since founding Plus One in 2016, he has focused on vision-guided robots doing real parcel work for the big couriers, a fleet that has now passed two billion picks.Erik joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about the distance between a robot demo and a real deployment, what it takes to sell automation to companies a thousand times your size, and why a human in the loop still keeps the robots working.The conversation ultimately points toward a future where progress comes less from how robots move than from how well hands and eyes work together, built by engineers who have lived with the problem on the operator’s side.  Also, check out the live stream response to Figure's Demo! https://bit.ly/4czQ37G

Russ Tedrake is a renowned roboticist, MIT professor, and founder and CEO of Walden Robotics. After decades of advancing robot locomotion, manipulation, and AI—including influential work with humanoids and the DARPA Robotics Challenge—he is now focused on bringing intelligent robots into real manufacturing environments.Russ joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about leaving the lab for the factory floor, the practical choices behind robots that can work today, and what the physical AI boom could mean for the future of manufacturing.The conversation ultimately points toward a future where robots don’t simply replace individual tasks, they help factory workers and production engineers improve entire systems faster than ever before.0:00 Intro 2:00 Lessons from Atlas: deforming legs and broken hands6:30 Kung-fu humanoids: entertainment vs. real-world value8:20 The real world is the ultimate eval — and the Walden pitch11:30 Humanoid or not? Wheeled base, grippers, and safety cases15:30 Why floors matter: flatness, wear, and messy facilities19:20 Generality and embodiment: how much does morphology matter?22:50 What data is actually salient? Filtering and noisy data26:50 Challenges as evals: the Amazon Picking Challenge and its alumni29:00 Capital, bubbles, and whether this time is different31:00 Reshoring, export rules, and the logistics engine33:40 Tips for founders and Chesterton's fence36:10 Factories are dynamic: co-evolving with robots37:20 The metronome effect and compounding automation gains41:15 Vibe coding the factory floor and the Toyota Production System45:30 The vibe at MIT, and closing

Mike McCue has spent 40 years building the tools that made the web more human, Paper Software, Netscape, Tellme Networks, and Flipboard. In this episode of Deployed, he sits down with Brad Porter, the founding engineer he once recruited at Tellme, to talk about what it actually takes to ship hard technology across the internet, mobile, and AI eras.They get into the first-principles call that saved Tellme (walking away from a company-defining AT&T check), how to build teams that compound, why he shipped voice AI two decades before the world was ready, and two unforgettable Steve Jobs stories, including the day Jobs picked up an iPad and explained Flipboard's purpose better than Mike could himself.