Tesla

The $15B Physical AI Company: Simulation, Autonomy OS, Neural Sim, & 1K Engineers—Applied Intuition

Apr 27, 2026 · 1:14:07

Applied Intuition co-founders Peter Ludwig and Qasar Younis argue that the real bottleneck in physical AI is deploying intelligence onto constrained hardware, not model intelligence itself. Their $15B company builds simulation, operating systems, and AI models for autonomous trucks, mining equipment, and defense systems. Starting as YC-era tooling for robotaxis, they now offer 30+ products across simulation & RL infrastructure, vehicle operating systems, and autonomy models. They compare fragmented vehicle software to pre-Android phones, and their OS enables reliable updates and L4 driverless operations (trucks running in Japan today). Verification uses statistical nines of reliability, and they internally adopt coding agents like Cursor and Claude Code. They hire 1,000 engineers at the hardware-software boundary.

The Stove Guy: Sam D'Amico Shows New AI Cooking Features on America's Most Powerful Stove at Impulse

Mar 31, 2026 · 37:03

Sam D'Amico, founder of Impulse, demonstrates the company's induction cooktop that uses a three-kilowatt-hour LFP battery to deliver 10,000 watts—boiling a liter of cold water in 40 seconds and holding a precise temperature for searing scallops without burning. The stove is rebuilt from first principles with custom power electronics and firmware, enabling OTA updates and software-defined features; a planned update will triple temperature-control speed from one minute 50 seconds to 40 seconds. D'Amico shows AI features powered by Claude that set burner temperatures (e.g., 446°F for scallops) and fetch recipes like Korean fried chicken or egg fried rice with char siu. He explains the origin story from a pizza in Japan, the decision to enter home appliances to avoid app-store dependencies, and the Impulse Core modular platform sold to OEMs. The cooktop launches through Zephyr in hundreds of showrooms nationwide and globally this year.