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And it effectively puts it with sim in charge of the operating system and electrical architecture or every future EV from Volkswagen and its associated brands, including familiar names like Audi, but also new companies like Scout. There's a lot of the coder ideas in there. I really wanted to know how that joint venture works and how it's structured to preserve Rivian's unique software culture, which you'll hear what sim talk about is the core element of the entire thing. I also wanted to know where the lines were, what parts of Rivian software get to be just for Rivian, and which parts of the core technology are shared across both the smaller company and the behemoth that is a Volkswagen group. And of course, I wanted to understand how with sim navigated the tension between the two.
You know, classic to coder v. It's also a big moment for Rivian in general right now. The company is gearing up to deliver the more affordable Rivian R2, which is the first vehicle based on this new architecture, and the company also just shipped the AI powered Rivian Assistant in its R1 vehicles. You'll hear what sim talked about the assistant is the beginning of a big bet for Rivian, as it tries to create a more egentic software platform in its cars. It actually has to spend some time with Rivian Assistant in an R1-assa-head of my conversation with sim, and I found it to be a fascinating experience, and certainly powerful and engaging, but at the same time, it's frustrating in a lot of really interesting ways.
So of course, I have a bunch of feature requests, bug reports, and questions about the future of AI in assistants and cars. We talked about his prediction from just a few years ago that buttons and cars were just an anomaly, and of course, how he's feeling about Android Auto and CarPlay these days. You'll hear it, but spoiler alert, don't get your hopes up. This is a really fun episode to cover. It's really in the weeds of a lot of my favorite things to talk about.
Okay, with sim vensite, Chief Software Officer Rivian, and Co-CEO of RV Tech. Here we go. What's the event said? You know, the Chief Software Officer Rivian, you're also the Co-CEO of a very important software joint venture between Rivian and Volkswagen, which is just straightforwardly called Rivian Volkswagen Group Technology. Welcome to the cover.
Thanks for being super excited to be here. I am very excited to talk to you. I have a lot to talk to you about. It occurred to me as we were doing the prep for this episode that you're in charge of building a new kind of software for cars, but also because of the joint venture, in charge of building a new kind of software company that builds the new kind of software for cars. It is the most fractal decoder I think we've ever had.
Awesome. There's a lot here. Let's start with the organization. So Chief Software Officer Rivian, I think a lot of people understand what that means. You're the guy that they can yell out about CarPlay. Don't worry. We'll come to that.
There's new Rivian Assistant, which is an intelligent agent inside the car that I'm playing with. I want to ask you a lot of questions about it. Then there's RV Tech, which is the joint venture with Volkswagen. You're building a new zone architecture for a bunch of cars. I believe the R2 is the first car that's going to run that new architecture.
How does that all work? What are the lines between RV Tech and your role there, the CoCio there, and your role with Rivian, and what is the boundary between the software you build and the software you build at Rivian? All right. Before we dive into our event venture, I think it's really important to talk about the overall industry landscape. The automotive industry is really going through a major disruption.
The amount of software content in the cars with technologies like electrification, connectivity, autonomy, is significantly increasing and that is creating a big divide between traditional OEMs and then new tech forward companies. Consumers now have really much higher levels of expectations in terms of the overall experience and convenience in the cars. Multiple OEMs have tried really hard to get software content, but it's not easy. It requires a very different type of talent. It requires, in some cases, really complete cultural change because you're not only developing software, but then you need to adopt different methodologies, different ways of doing things. You need to be much more agile.
When you look at the industry, companies have tried to do that in-house, some of them tried to partner, some of them tried to use tier ones and a lot of recipes did not really work. That was really the genesis of the great partnership that we have now with the Volkswagen Group, which has really taken the Rivian technology stack, taken software, the electrical architecture, the Rivian DNA and culture as well, and then marrying that with the incredible scale that the Volkswagen Group has, and it really provides a fantastic opportunity for both companies because now we can have a solution that can not only underpin the European vehicles, as we mentioned, with the R2 as the first car that the joint venture is shipping, but then eventually in the future, every single electric model in the VW.
Think about it from your premium cars, an Audi, for example, to luxury cars with Porsche, and then the BMW, to the mass market cars. That suddenly provides an opportunity of scale, but then also it exercises the technology in very different ways and really puts us in a wonderful position so that we can build an architecture and operate an existing 14-day industry. That question of architecture and operating system, it feels very complicated. As you said, the industry is moving to software-defined vehicles, which is a great buzzword, and every car executive that I talk to very clearly has a different definition of what software-defined vehicle means.
What is your definition of what software-defined vehicle means? First of all, I hate that buzzword. You brought it up! I actually can't find a better name, so I admit that I'm also using the same in the lack of a better definition. But think about it this way. I mean, when you look at older architecture cars,
they're really a negotiation of multiple mechanical components, and they're underneath that there's, in some cases, hundreds of electronic units, which are meant, each one of them is meant to do one thing. And generally, that's actually mirroring the way those cars are built, because they are developed using different tier ones and then different suppliers. In that world, integrating an internal vehicle feature requires a ton of coordination between many of those suppliers that requires very long development cycles. And that approach kind of worked in the past when the expectations of consumers were not super high in terms of engine features in the cars, but I think with the advancement of EVs, with the types of user experiences that the Tesla's and the Rivians and the Chinese cars are offering now, that's no longer a Rivian option for any car manufacturer.
And I'll give you just a small example. I mean, when you walk to a Rivian, and I know you're currently having a gentle quad, you have your Apple, let's say, digital key, you walk to the car, and then the car will recognize you, and then there's a light-end sequence, and then you get to the car, and your entire profile is configured, and then whether it's the seats, whether it's the steering wheel, whether it's the infodainment system, whether it's the HVAC, everything is configured for you. That sequence is probably just 15 seconds, but doing that in the traditional world requires the coordination of more than 10 different suppliers.
You need to talk to the seat supplier, you need to talk to the door supplier, you need to talk to the HVAC supplier, you need to talk to the infodainment supplier, you need to talk to the security system, you need to talk to the cloud, you need to talk to the third party for the digital key, and then just imagine that for whatever reason, you want to slightly change that sequence, then you're going again for another cycle of changes, and this is why that old model really doesn't work anymore. Cars now are integrated systems with what we call zone computers, and it thinks about them as this is a general purpose, powerful compute, that we place in the middle of the car, and they become the centralized brain of the different functions, and then the more software you can move on those zones, the more it provides the control of those end-to-end features, for the customers.
So this is the pitch that every pure play car startup has been making for a long time, right? The way that the OEM's built cars was done, and you shouldn't have 1200 ECUs from 1200 different suppliers, and that was fine for gas cars, or pretty dumb, where the only computer was my old Pioneer head unit that had the screen that folded out. By the way, I love that head unit, you could bring that back out for me. I have fond teenage memories of my dumb old car with that head unit. Now the whole cars are computers, and you expect a lot of things to happen, and that integration is too hard.
What I would say broadly is that the legacy OEMs have known this for years, so they have been on their own journey to solve this problem, to cut down the number of ECUs. Jim Farley was on the show from four, five years ago, being like, two of these ECUs, we're cutting down. And Volkswagen in particular had its own giant project to do this that failed. I think we can now, now there's enough distance here, a year and a half into the new JV, we can say, Khariad, which Volkswagen had started failed. Why do you think the new JV and the infusion of Rivian culture is going to be successful, where Volkswagen's attempt to do it on its own did not mean any kind of positive results?
You're getting me in trouble. That's what I do here. I think really, what I personally appreciate in terms of the Volkswagen Group decision is the recognition that developing what is called software-defined vehicles requires a completely cheated approach. You cannot approach it just by then dates and then just by trying to have some level of software content into the car. And as we said, the Volkswagen Group have tried, they actually have tried twice, but really deep inside, there's two things which are really important here.
One thing is you need to have talent who are able to develop true software, not abstracted functions like what the automotive industry are using, things like probably you have heard about what was hard, but it true had toted operating system. And then you also need a deep cultural change, with really very different way of approaching the car and the overall development. And the old traditional model, cars are defined many, many years in advance. People claim that they know about the software features four or five years in advance, and then it's a very fixed, waterfall approach.
The way we design cars, actually, and for example, is we actually really design the car around the electrical architecture and around software and around the accessibility of software. So software and technology is at the table since very early. It actually impacts the overall packaging of the car, and we really use that platform and that operating system mindset so that we have a car that can evolve over time and that gets better and better for our customers. And such changes are so deep where really to do it well, you either need to have the right partner or you go with the clean sheet approach.
And I think the Volkswagen group has made the right decision to really partner with everyone in this case, and not only embrace that technology that we built from the ground up, but then also embrace the culture, the approach, and then the DNA of working at the bottom. How is the joint venture structure? I know you have a COSIO, it's Carson helping his Volkswagen CTO. So you have two COSIOs, how is it structured underneath that? Underneath that, there's a technical team.
So software engineering, electrical engineering, the technical team reports to me, and then Carson is my partner in crime. He takes care of the operations, and then he's also the main interface to the Volkswagen group. There's a ton of complexity in terms of managing different requirements, different inputs from the brands, really doing all that articulation, so that we continue pushing towards the platform approach, and then we will use the overall complexity of the portfolio that we're supporting with the beta new group. So one of the questions I have here is you described as an operating system. It seems like a good framework, people understand what operating systems are.
I realize car operating systems are vastly more complex than people given credit for, but it's an operating system. Then there's expressions of the operating system, and I know that our audience, they think of the software in the car and they think of the entertainment screen, and that's it. That's just one expression, right? The user interface that RIVian is running, there's going to be other expressions for Volkswagen for Scout, I presume, for Lamborghini, all running the same core operating system expressed in different ways. That is a real push and pull dynamic, right?
Where do the features live, who gets to build what feature, what are the core capabilities of the operating system in the platform, versus what does Lamborghini want that it doesn't want RIVian to have? How do you make those decisions? Yeah, great question. I mean, really first of all, I think what's important for us is to clarify the role of the joint venture. So we're responsible of the underlying electrical architecture and then the operating system, and what that means exactly is, I mean, when you look at the modern car today, pretty much everything you interact with the car is powered by software, and in most of the cases you don't realize it, I mean, people tend to associate software to the entertainment, what they see on the UI and the screen, but there's software everywhere in the car.
I mean, the way the car navigates, the way the car drives, the way the car saves energy, the way the car does, is having comfort, all of that is actually managed through software. So the way to think about this is our role is to, first of all, build an electrical architecture with as less as possible of computers in the car so that we simplify the overall packaging, we simplify the overall build of materials, and this is the brain of the system. And then on top of that, we develop software that the different brands can use so that they express their own identity and think about it in a way where we do 80% and 90% of the hard work, and then we provide customization hooks so that an Audi drives like an Audi and then a Lamborghini presents a different UI than a Rivian, but then what's happening under the hood, what's happening behind the scenes, is based on the same platform.
When you think about that underlying electrical architecture, and the zonal computers, and I cut down the number of computers, but have fewer and more powerful computers, one of the things that it seems like an obvious opportunity for Rivian and maybe way more complicated for Volkswagen is that you have a big battery that can just power those computers all the time. They can be online, they can be functional, they can be available. Volkswagen also makes gas cars and then hybrids. There's some pendulum swing in the industry between electrics and gas vehicles, particularly in the United States. Is that a challenge or are you just not thinking about their gas cars at all?
The scope of the John Venture for the Dining is really powering all the electric vehicles. This is the agreement that we have with Volkswagen, and the promise needed part of it is one of the main reasons for the Dining and the John Venture for the mission. I think the John Venture provides us with an extra opportunity so that we can get this technology to accelerate the electrification into many more cars around the world. One of the first products that we're building with the Volkswagen Group is the ID1, which is taking our technology to a mass market vehicle. This is a car that we're selling for less than $25,000, and really opening the technology opening that Rich feature said to many more consumers around the world.
Now, can the technology be used for non-evies, can be used for hybrids or eyes? Obviously, the answer is yes, but for the time being, this is not the priority of the John Venture. How big is RVTEC? How many people? We're about 1,500 people.
And how does that split between Rivian folks or Volkswagen folks? Are they employees of both companies or are they employees of RVTEC? They're employers of RVTEC. We started with about 800, 900 developers coming from Rivian, and then we had about probably 50 colleagues who joined us from the Volkswagen Group. And then the rest, this is developers and engineers that we hired in the past 18 months.
So everybody's RVTEC. The reason I said, as you mentioned at the very beginning, that it's an infusion of Rivian's culture. But now they're not Rivian employees. But then you are also the Chief Software Officer of Rivian. How does that culture persist if the thing is its own entity, and it's not as directly connected to Rivian or they're not Rivian employees?
I think the way I probably define my job and probably my priority number one is help the company grow and build on our domain assets. I think our domain assets is one technology into our people and culture. Technology, I think we have a wonderful opportunity now by taking that technology into many more cars across a wide range of both volume and trims. And then culture, that's my daily obsession, which is really making sure that we continue to have the same DNA of agility, being nimble, prioritizing action, quick decision making, and really iterating really fast so that we have the front front of innovation.
One of the best assets is there's Rivian decisions that maybe Volkswagen won't make. Rivians right now, they run Unreal Engine, right, is the graphics and the infotainment. It's really fun. I'm not sure that every single Volkswagen is going to run Unreal Engine, right? That's a decision that feels like, at least as I understand it, the different brands can make for themselves.
But you're the Chief Software Officer at Rivian. You're like, we need better support for the Unreal Engine interface, and then maybe the platform doesn't want that, and you wear that hat too. How do you reconcile those tensions? Is Rivian's needs always win? What wins is how can we do the software in a way that allows different expressions?
I think in this case, Rivian's interface will show up through Unreal Engine, but then we need to have hooks in our frameworks that like to request. I know you will ask me that Volkswagen cars can have car play, and the team will develop that even though Rivian will not adopt car play. So it's really about creating those different hooks into the operating system so that we allow different ways to express the user interface. It strikes me just talking about this, that there aren't a lot of models in an industry as big as the auto industry like this, where the big player is letting the smaller company define the culture and the opportunity, define the architecture which will define its roadmap in the future.
What things have you looked at that are similar that you say that's successful, we should build a model based on this and operate like this? And what versions of this have failed that you've looked at? I don't want to avoid those mistakes. Great question. I think lots of people look at joint ventures, and I think there's probably many more failure stories than success stories.
And this has been really one of the guiding principles that we've spent a lot of time discussing with the VW leadership before we engage in such partnerships. Now, really what made Arjai and myself lean heavily into this partnership is one of the opportunity and then to the honest and constructive partnership from the Volkswagen group leadership. And first of all, we are talking about taking the revenue technology into the second largest OEM in the world. This is by far the biggest licensing dean in the automotive industry.
And as Arjai and I started the discussions with Oliver Bloomer, his number one priority was we need to keep the right way of doing things. We realized that you are bringing not only a software IP, you are bringing not only an electronics IP, but you are bringing a different process, you are bringing a different culture. And we need that change from the inside for the VW group. And I think across the past 18 months, I mean, obviously in some cases there are data tensions. I mean, there are cases where, as you mentioned, one brand, minor request, a different requirement than another brand.
But what really helped us to continue is that support that we have from the highest levels of the leadership and the Volkswagen group to really help ride that transformation and that cultural change in the group. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Visit BetMDM Casino and check out the newest exclusive, the Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and Gamesense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus the wager.
Ontario only, please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact a next Ontario at 1-866-53-1-2600 to speak to an advisor. BetMDM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming, Ontario. We're back with Brilliant Software Chief with SimVentay.
Before the break, we were discussing his role as co-CEO of Rivians Joint Venture with WebSigant and how that organization is structured. Now I want to ask the other to take a question. How does your Sim make decisions? Let me ask you the other to take a question and I want to turn to the software itself. I ask you another question.
We've talked about a little bit. How do you make decisions? What's your framework for making decisions? I think the number one rule, I mean, obviously my job is making decisions, but there's a number of guidelines that I try to apply. First of all, in terms of coaching with my team, I try to push decisions as much as possible.
I try to build those levels of the organization. I think really one of the anti-patterns that I see in a bunch of companies where they try to bubble up decisions to the highest levels of executives. That tends to create a culture where things are slow and then employees don't feel really empowered. Now in cases where I personally have to make the decision, if you guys want to meet with one option, show that you want to analyze, have multiple options, and then make a recommendation. I want a culture where I empower my team to be really a force of proposal and then come up themselves with recommendations.
Now the rule that I use in terms of how much time should I spend on the decision is really is it a one-way decision or is it a two-way decision? If it's a two-way decision, then I don't need to spend that much time on it. It doesn't need to be really a hard framework. We don't need to go into an extreme in some cases of collecting tons and tons of data so that we get to a decision. In some cases, I will just use my gut.
I'm a product builder at heart and I know that some of the decisions, even if I'm not a one-way decision, even if the data are against me, then I'll go with my feeling. I mean, in some cases, I'm wrong and I'm the first to recognize that. Now, if it's a one-way decision, then that's a different process which requires much more preparation, requires much more data and then I'll be patient for how we do things. Do you have any example in this context of a one-way decision at RVTech in a two-way decision? There's multiple of them.
I think probably one of them is like leading to probably the next topic of discussion that we have, which is our overall approach around AI. We had a ton of debate internally of whether we should basically just use a third-party AI solution or develop our own solution. There's a ton of tension because you look at the adjustments in the AI world and you would think that with everything which is happening, this is obviously a hard problem to solve. Now, it was really clear for me, given the opportunity, given how transformative this is the entire user experience, that we really need to own our destiny in terms of having a platform that allows us to change foundation models as we wish and own that integration layer that allows us to power the entire total grading system.
So this is Ruby and Assistant. I've been playing with it for a few days now. I've had a question. I truly had some searching conversations with it. Just to push the boundary of what it can do.
It's super interesting to have a car where even in the interface it does the wavy line on the main screen, it's very much the car is running it's assistant. Not an overlay. You can tell it can go and address lots of parts of the car. And then there are places where it can't or it won't. Actually, I think one of the interesting things about it is it won't tell you why it can't do things.
It is assistant but it won't tell you why it can't do things. I don't have very specific questions about that. But it strikes me that this is a natural evolution of, okay, the whole car is run by a finite set of computers. And that means our system can just run around and talk to those computers and talk to the functions of those computers control in a way that I don't know if you try to glue an assistant onto a Cadillac EV. If you try to glue an assistant onto that, it has to go talk to its ECU.
It's just very obvious that something else is happening with Google assistant in that car. That's the opportunity. The assistant can talk to the whole car. Then there are places where it just can't for some reason. I'll give you one example.
It just struck me as very odd. I was driving the rain. I said, hey, turn on the back window wiper. And it just won't. And I thought, is that a safety reason?
Is that you just don't know how to do it? You're lost in the zonal architecture. And I asked it and said, I can't tell you why I can't do these things. But here's where the button is, which is really interesting for an assistant car to do. I'm not going to do it for you, but the button is on the stock push the button.
How do you make those decisions in the context of an assistant of what it can and cannot do? Awesome. So there's a lot of things here. I mean, first of all, I think you described it really, really well. Our approach, our philosophy for the region assistant is not just with the chatbot and then slap it on top of the UI.
It's really developing what will become the connective tissue that enables our users to interact with pretty much every single feature in the car. And even more than that, bring their own personal digital ecosystem in the car through the electronic integration. Now, to your question, what it can do and then what it cannot do, as controlling the wiper, it's obviously possible. And I'm sure that you have seen that it can do way more. It can change your drive modes.
It can change your ride height. Right. I can raise and lower the car at 55 miles an hour with the air suspension, which was cool. And it was like the slowest lowrider experience you could possibly have. And then I couldn't turn on the wiper.
So what is the split? Yeah. And that's honestly, that's one of my favorite features. And the way I like to interact with it is I don't tell it to change the ride height. I tell it, okay, give me drive mode with more back.
And then it does it. And it changes to sports mode. And this is really the magic of having that true conversational experience. Now, the reason it does not do wiper is by design, we actually block a number of features which are safety related. And cars are obviously homulated, regulated.
So everything related to wikers, things related to windshield controls, things related to highway assistance, those are regulated functions, which today through our framework, we block them for safety reasons. And safety is really one of the core tenets in how we develop the entire experience. So the other one that struck me, you know, cars have rear seat sensors. We have kids. So every time I get out of my car, it reminds me.
There might be a kid in the backseat because it has sensed the weight in the backseat. I think this is one of the funniest sensors any car can have because the car seat is always in the backseat. So it's always reminding me that the kid might be in the car. So I asked it, is anyone in the backseat? And it, maybe this is just a bug, but it said, I'll find out.
And then I said, I can't access that sensor. And I said, what sensor are you trying to access? And it refused. And I probably had a five-minute argument with your assistant about why it wouldn't tell me what sensor it was trying to access. The reason I'm asking this is not because it's a bug or I really needed to know if anyone at the car seat at the time.
I'm just very curious as you think about building the assistant that can access all of the sensors and how we interact with cars, there's just a moment where maybe it's for safety reasons or maybe it just doesn't work right now in the version I have where the LLM has to go talk to another computer and that computer has to give it permission. And I don't know if anyone in any part of the tech industry has figured out exactly how that should work. And I'm just wondering what your point of view is. Yeah. I think in this case it should have actually told you what's in the backseat.
So that's a bug. No, it was like I'm not telling you what sensor I'm trying to do. I was like, why? I'm not going to tell you what sensor I'm trying to get to. That one is on me.
And I think you can hear that I mean we have it even has something. And then we'll flip the phone and send you a new team next time. That's very good. Every time we get a car exactly what I'm trying to complain about the experiences I have, it's perfect. But that piece where it's how do you talk to the computer and what permission does that other computer give you?
Every assistant at every level is running into that specific barrier. And I'm just curious what you think the answer is. Yeah. I mean pretty much I think think about our architecture this way. The assistant has deep integration into the entire vehicle operating system.
So in theory, I mean what the integrations that we have built and that we have about the other thing is that we have to be able to do everything. The only functions which are not allowed are functions which are safety related because obviously of the communication reasons, but then also functions where we think that the level of reliability that we can get from the other end does not make us comfortable to expose them to the end users. But that's really like the beauty of the internal in-house orchestration layer that we have built where we have a ton of guardrails which allow us to control which functions are exposed by the assistant or not.
You mentioned that I was going to get you in trouble. We get you in trouble again. In 2024, you said using buttons in a car is an anomaly of modern design and that people love buttons in a car. So you got in trouble for some of that. But the thing you said was that voice should be the future.
Okay. This is the first gesture at voice being the future. Is it good enough? Because we're right on the cusp of are these things actually good enough to build the kinds of products we want. I think we are on the cusp of something really big and I deeply believe like when you think about it, you're in the car, you're driving, you're focused on the road.
So in theory, in theory, the primary interface with which you should be interacting with the car is actually voice. The only reason that drivers and consumers so far do not interact with the car through voice is that to put it really bluntly, the technology has been broken. And I think that's really the beauty of what we have now through the technology destruction which is coming with the foundation models. The foundation models are providing us this wonderful opportunity so that we can truly get to a conversational experience and where drivers can interact with the car in human language.
I don't need to tell the car, open the front. I can say open the front front or actually I can say I have a bag in front of the car and it will actually open the front. And I think that completely changes the way you interact with the car. On top of that, we have now the opportunity with all the agent framework so that we truly can give people their time back in the car. And I hope you try our Google calendar agent integration.
But you can imagine how they experience within the future where you're driving and then you should be able to perform operations on your calendar. You should be able to perform operations on your email and then in the future with the framework that we have with the agent to agent integration, you can interact with many more apps from your own digital personal ecosystem. Can I ask you about the word agent in this context? The way the Google calendar integration works with the organization is to describe it with people. It shows you a QR code, you connect to Google calendar to it and then the ribbon assistant can read your calendar at events or move into events.
Do calendar stuff. I'm very curious how that's agentic and how it's built such that word agentic is meaningful because I have 500 apps over the past 10 years that can do Google calendar stuff through the standard API. How is it agentic? Is it something else? Why build it that way versus doing API integrations?
You can build an API integration. I think the advantage of an agentic integration is that you can share the context and then you can perform multiple integrations within the car. In this case, it's based on this is an MCP integration which also allows us to think about it in a way where you can imagine that in the future instead of having that mono access to every single app on your car or honestly to that extent even on your smartphone, you can start aggregating and connecting many of those apps through the agentic framework and have them present a unified user experience.
This is how we're able to connect the navigation to calendar, for example. I can go to the assistant now and I can go to the assistant. I want to play a trip from San Francisco to San Diego. I want to have two charging stops. I want them to be close to an Italian restaurant.
I love Italian food. The assistant would go and play that and then I'll say, okay, print the summary and add it to my calendar and then send it as a text to my wife. This type of integrations when you have behind the scenes the agentic framework can really allow many more capabilities which in the future as well and this is where agentic can be even further utilized, you can start going into more autonomous functions in the sense that let's say you have an invitation in the calendar with X, Y, C, details and then you can start having reminders saying, okay, do you want to go to this place or you're actually really late to your meeting, do you want me to start preconditioning your car?
So that's the beauty of bringing the depth of the agentic integration. We need to take on a short break. Visit BetMDM Casino and check out the newest exclusive, the Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to later. Ontario only, please play responsibly.
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Should you grow a playoff beard? What about a playoff mustache? A playoff soul patch? Rated playoff motten shots? Or maybe just playoff stubble?
Whatever you grow. It's up to you. Just like it's up to you to ask your doctor about wiggovie. We're back with Rivian Chief Software Officer, with Sim Ben Said, discussing the ins and outs of the company's new AI powered voice assistant. So I think I understand that, right?
You're in your car, you can go access a bunch of apps and services you have, you can take actions across them, you've collected a lot of data in one place. This brings me to like a very deep sort of existential question, whenever anyone talks about ambient computing in this way. Where does the logic live? Right? The idea that you're going to have that interaction in your car and not at your laptop or on your phone, that seems like a big jump to me.
Right? The same way that when the smart speaker company is going to be like, you're going to talk to your thermostat. I'm going to talk to my phone. I don't feel the need to talk to my thermostat in this way. Do you think people are going to do that in the car or are you going to bring an assistant to the Rivian app on a phone?
Can you compete with the series and Google assistants in that way? How is that all going to work? I think actually, like what I think about it, I think it will be both. I think this is really the big difference between the old world where we had unique applications and the world where we had agent integrations. Think about the Rivian assistant as an agent orchestrator, which has privileges because you can deeply integrate with the vehicle controls, with the vehicle operating system, and the safety, which things to do, which things not to do.
And nobody else can give up that better than us because we developed the entire vehicle software. But then at the same time, it has interfaces and connections to other agents. And this is just the beginning. I think about it in a way where in the future you can actually probably be able to bring your own personal favorite assistant and chatbot to the car and then it can share context with the Rivian assistant. I mean, this is really the possibilities that this new type of integrations is allowing us to do.
Is the Rivian assistant the kind of thing that is possible because of the RV tech software stack? And is it possible that we'll see the Rivian assistant or something just like it in Vaux Dragons as well? Or is it special to Rivian? This is special to Rivian everything, which is AI stack is developed uniquely for Rivian. I mean, this is Rivian's brand priority as we see cars becoming more and more AI defined, but we're in discussions so that we can have some new technologies for the whole time.
Rivians are sort of famously on LTE. When I first got in this car, I saw the LTE internet and I thought, oh, something must be wrong. And I drove around and I realized, it's just LTE. Is there any latency concern with that, especially with voice and going out in the world and doing whatever inference you need to do? So two things.
One, we need to get to an R2. The R2 has one key. There you go. It's coming soon and it's amazing. And then two, having your touch base really on one of the architecture considerations for the technology, which is when you look at the like the Rivian R1 today, most of the interactions will happen with the cloud.
So as you say, it's connectivity dependent and then they will happen best when there's a strong connectivity with the external world. Now, there's a number of interactions that happen locally with the car. And if you get the car, I am honed. That interaction is being managed by a small language model that sits directly on the edge. Now, the beauty of what will happen next as we get to R2, not only will have 5G, but then edge AI will be way more powerful than capable on the R2.
Just be clear for the audience. We say edge, even in local. Right? It's right in the R2. Meaning that the local computer on the R2 will have up to 200 sparse tops of compute that you get to the R1.
I know this sounds extremely technical, but think about it as this is more capable than some of the self-driving platforms today. And it's more capable than the amount of AI compute that you have in your smartphone. And a lot of that would be available locally in the R2 car, which is coming soon. And that allows, as you mentioned, to basically not face such limitations and issues with connectivity, but truly get to much lower latency because a lot of the processing will happen directly on the embedded locally and get to a truly conversational experience where it's pretty much instant.
Can I just ask you a very in the weeds question? We're talking about putting a car, we're going to do some of our local inference in the car. GPUs are expensive. RAM is expensive. How much of the build materials is RJ giving you to do all this in the car versus bigger motors, bigger batteries?
How much of the range can you pull off to do local inference in the car? This is kind of the trade-off you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, this is what I love about RJ, which is what has always attracted me with RJ, that RJ thinks big things long-term. And he knows that in this case that the world is moving to AI, and this is why the way we do decisions, for example, from a previous standpoint, it's a very hard process where there's a ton of trade-offs all the time. And you can imagine the tension between people wanting to push for a better exterior part, and then people wanting to push for a better interior part, and then people wanting to have better technology.
And then we have what we call the fun or the differentiation budget in the car. And RJ absolutely was no discussion that we would equip the car with higher inference compute and then higher memory because this is really the future. And it's an opportunity for us to completely reshape the way people interact with their cars. And actually, in the long run, to be honest, it solves itself from a unit economics standpoint, because as we do more and more interactions locally in the car, we avoid the back and forth with the clouds, we avoid the connectivity costs, and then we also don't have to pay for the inference costs on the clouds.
In the long run, it's actually economically positive as well. That's not just a spreadsheet made up to win an argument that actually models out. Because I can find a question. The reason I said that the next question was about inference costs, right? They're going up that there's rate limits of all the big providers.
What model are you using right now? What are the frontier models you're using right now? Actually, the architecture that we have built is not model dependent. So really, one of the foundations of the architecture is that allows us to interact and plug and play pretty much with different foundational models. And similarly, you can use different modalities in the way.
Users can input their request, whether it's voice in this case, but then you can use vision as well. You can use text if we want to enable that. When it comes to the models themselves, we use currently a combination of internal models for everything that runs locally on the edge. And then we use models from Google to have partnership with Google. Things are going really well in terms of deep access to the advanced Gemini models as well as the grounding of results, which is also powered by Google.
This is a question I asked it to just what are the top five headlines in the verge? Just to see. Can this thing browse the web? And it returns some results. They were just 24 or 48 hours old.
It was their top five lines from yesterday. Does this thing have a web browser in the background? Or is it just pulling from a Google data corpus? How does that work? It should, in theory, connect with your time.
And then this is where the grounding with the Google results comes into the picture. And in theory, it should give you the latest headlines. So if it didn't, then that's another one on me. I was just curious. A lot of people have this experience now where the data in the model is old.
And then there's some cut off. I was just trying to find a cut off. And then I had a long searching conversation with it about we need to buy a new air conditioner. And I was just asking it to do math about air conditioner efficiencies. It's very boring, but this is what I talked to your car about for a while.
And it just occurred to me, like I am making it think very hard. I'm wasting more energy talking about how efficient of an air conditioner to buy. This is not a good ratio of energy spent to save energy over here. How does that work? You have to pay a monthly fee for the Productivity Package to access Assistant.
But then I might burn way more tokens than that fee could ever pay for. How does that math work out? It really depends on it. It's a great question. Now, obviously, in these cases, there's also techniques of what we go rate limiting that we can apply.
Like if we have seen a new face that you're spending 20 hours discussing with the Assistant, then we may do something behind the scenes. Similarly, in the way we can figure the models, we, I mean, given the types of interactions that you have in the car, you would not be interacting with the latest and greatest say, Opus 4.7 models so that you bring so many tokens. And then a lot of it also depends on the aggregation across users in terms of the types of requests, as well as arbitration that we do between the edge and the cloud. And as I mentioned, the more we move to edge and local compute, the better it is for us in terms of overall influence costs.
So let me just ask you a question again. Now you've shipped this software, people are using it, you're getting extremely detailed feedback from me. Do you still think having buttons in the car is an anomaly? I think, I deeply think that voice has the chance to be the primary interface in the car. I also think that buttons can exist, but then they shouldn't be the primary way with which you interact with the car.
I think there's much more that is possible through voice where you can not only do one single function, you don't have to go and fit it with so many functions, you don't have to go even deep into the touchscreen to look into specific features. A great voice experience can really elevate all of that and allow users to talk to the car as a human would do. And will you take the overall experience to the next level? Are we going to get the H-Track buttons back and any future Rivians? That's really what I'm asking here.
Actually, with the R2, we have a great way to have it at the high feedback for H-Track. Oh, the pedals on the wheel? Yeah, they're really awesome. That's a good pivot, but I'm asking, are we going to get the fan speed button? The fan speed button back in the center stack.
The center stack knows that we have the same behavior. It's a good compromise. You know what's coming? I have to ask you about CarPlay here. Because it strikes me just as you imagine this future of the car where it's connected to your calendar, it's connected to all this context.
It has autonomy, which is something you're also working on. You get in the car and it knows it's time to go to work and you just say, let's go and the car takes off driving. This is when you would use a vast number of applications. This might be when you have the focus to push the buttons again. I'll just make that argument.
But this is when you would want a whole number of apps. I hear from our readers every time I talk to a car executive. The reason I want CarPlay is because there's 5,000 apps on my phone and no car OEM is ever going to support them on the built-in entertainment. This is why you would say, okay, project your phone to the center stack. The car is driving itself. Have at it.
Phone projection all day. Do you think that the tide is turning? Are you still absolutely committed to having CarPlay in our vehicles? I think first of all, it's really important to go through our philosophy of how we see software in the car and how we see user interface. The challenge with screen-varying solutions is that they take over every single person in the car.
That's not the way we see ourselves interact with our users. You drove our car four years ago and you drove the car in the past few days. I hope you have seen how much change happened in the car. That's truly by bringing the end-to-end teachers. Not only changing the user interface, but having your navigation, knowing exactly about your drive mode, knowing exactly about your efficiency, offering that level of convenience.
It's really what is resonating with a lot of our customers. Even if I looked at our own internal statistics five years ago, when we first shipped the R1T and the R1S, the number one request from customers was CarPlay. At the time, we do all sorts of survey with customers. More than 70% of customers were requesting CarPlay. In the recent survey, that number is less than 25% now because with the level of features that we have shipped to customers, with the level of integration, with the level of convenience that we are bringing, CarPlay is over and without to that extent, is no longer the topic of discussion.
I think what we're actually seeing right now with the advancement of AI technologies is just another reason why I didn't believe that RGA and Rivian we made the right choice in terms of investing into our technology and our software. Cars are moving from, as you said, the buzzy word of software defined to AI defined. The possibilities that we have now to have such deep AI integration into the car, it will make the entire CarPlay debate in the future completely obsolete. I really believe that the way you interact with apps with which are monothreaded, single buttoned, single icons, a lot of that will be now completely reshaped into a world where it will become an agentic integration that presents itself into a wholesome user experience to the user.
I buy that in the big picture, but give you an example of that. I'll just put up an idea that I get from a reader all the time. So for you to react to, there are tons of little apps. They're basically media playing apps on phones. And it's trivial to push the button into the CarPlay app.
The one that I was thinking about, we got an email from a reader and he said, I have a Bible app that is never going to be inbuilt into anyone's infotainment system. It's made by a small developer and I love it and that's why I need CarPlay and I'm always going to buy a CarPlay because of it. That is about as small of an edge case as you get, but this one customer is going to pick a car based on it. Are you going to make that developer build an agentic AI integration into the Rivian Assistant or lose that customer carplay? This is the beauty of the technology disruption in which we are today.
In the end, in that case, there's not necessarily need to be, we will build an agentic integration for that particular app. It can be if it is like, say, a Spotify or an Apple music, absolutely. But then if it's a small app, the answer to that could be that from the Rivian Assistant, we have an integration to your favorite voice assistant on the car and then you can ask the voice assistant on the car to play that particular app through Bluetooth audio. That is possible as we open up the framework and as we allow more integrations to bring your own digital ecosystem to the car. So you're saying I've got, we'll use Google because Gemini is more present on an Android phone than Siri is currently on iPhone.
So you're saying you talk to Rivian Assistant, Rivian Assistant knows about your Google account and your Android phone and it's going to go talk to Gemini. And Gemini is going to go operate your phone in Streamlintooth audio to the Rivian Assistant. In the future, all of that is possible. Is that better or worse than phone projection? This is like a different kind of loop than just saying, put the interface here and let the user do it.
It could be possible through phone projection. I think the challenge with phone projection again is that first of all, you have to go, like as you're driving, you have to go through your phone. In some cases, you have to press multiple buttons so you get to the menu of your own app. The other thing is that it takes over the entire screen and that is a degradation of the experience. Now, is the alternative solution available right now?
No, but I think the beauty of the wave of technology in which we are is that we finally have the building blocks so that we can really, really find the site of interactions. And we can allow hooks now into your own personal device through a different wave interaction rather than truly integrating into the app on the card setters or take over the entire screen from your phone. There's a third path now which is possible. I mean, obviously I think it might be easier with Google, again, they're your partner. But where would that connection to Google Assistant happen?
Would I be like, I don't think I'm holding up my Android phone to the speaker and letting the assistants talk to each other out loud. Although that would be fun. I mean, that would be deeply hilarious to hear the two assistants just have a conversation. Like, can you please play the music app for me? Does that happen in the cloud? Does it happen locally?
What does that integration point between assistants happen? I mean, think about it as the assistant in the car would never have to talk to your team and your own personal assistant and then in that case your own personal assistant would be controlling your phone. The reason I'm asking this in this way is at some point you have one main assistant and all the other things are sort of like agents that can talk to you. And then maybe no one's ever talking to a living assistant again. Right?
This is kind of the you pull that thread all the way and generalize just doing everything for you all the time. Is that it is that a danger? We just know we're close to you and having to worry about that. Honestly, we don't worry about that because we know we know the opportunity that we have and we know the level the breadth of capabilities that we can offer. No other assistant would be able to know as much as they're in a system about the common course.
Not similarly, the fact that we have the surface of integration sitting on operating system enables a ton of opportunities in terms of use cases that you cannot simply do with your phone or you cannot simply do by calling another assistant. Imagine, okay, I'm driving and then in the near future, we should be able to have an agent integration with your favorite food delivery and then you would say, okay, I need to be the car knows exactly when you will be home. You'll say, okay, order my favorite sandwich from XYZ shop.
Your account is already configured and then the assistant will pick the destination will get you to your favorite restaurant. All of that is integrated. You just need to do it through one voice command like this type of experiences where things become so seamless where things become so easy as if you're talking to a human, which connects the dots across multiple surfaces of your digital ecosystem would only be possible through such integration. All right, well, so we're out of time here. As you can tell, I can obviously talk to you about this forever.
I don't think anyone has figured out how all this works and it seems like you're making some big decisions. So you're going to have to come back as you've learned how this goes after this shift to all of your customers. And certainly when the R2 is out, there is one question that I have to ask every single Rivian person that I encounter. It is very important to me. When is the R3X coming up?
It's here. When can I get one? It's by the way, it's my favorite car. And like I keep asking Arge that question all the time. Now you talk about decisions.
You talk about trade offs and us delivering the R2 before the R3X, you can imagine it's a big decision. It's also a hard decision because in our hearts, we all deeply want to have the R3X as soon as possible. Now we also know that the R2 has the best ingredients to be a wildly successful car. The US needs another alternative for great S2G for families. And this is what the R2 brings.
As we shift the R2, as we scale our volume as a company, we will earn the R2 so that we bring fantastic and such emotional cars like the R3X. I know that that is in one way the right answer. I'm just saying for me personally, come on, let's just send me one. It'll be great. That's a hard thing to offer.
I'll give you more feedback just like this. I will break your R3X prototype in 10,000 different ways. You'll get the bug reports. It'll be great. Tell RJ I made you off.
Awesome. I'll get one of this in time. That's good. Thank you so much for being on the cover. This is great.
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