When Robots Started Fighting Each Other In San Francisco

It was always going to come to this. Robot fights in San Francisco. Over the past couple of months, semi-secret invite-only battles have been taking place in a downtown parking garage. We managed to get the first exclusive look at the mayhem. It's bot versus bot with human pilots off to the side and a rabid crowd frothing for robot carnage. It can be exciting and fun at times. It can also be farcical and underwhelming. But it's happening, and there's a dude who thinks he can take these robot battles mainstream. "Yeah!" And his name is Six. Six's Robot Lair is here. A warehouse space in the heart of San Francisco.

I'm Six. I jokingly call myself the Chief Fighting Officer, but I'm the CEO. And yeah, I've been working on this for about 7 months now.

Running motion policy in 3, 2, 1.

We are REC, the USC of robots.

And Six is your real name?

6 is my real name. It was legally name changed about 12 years ago now. I grew up pretty socially ostracized, and so the internet was my outlet to connect with people. And I got really big into MMOs and online role-playing games. And kind of my coming to age was calling myself 6, and I would lead raids, and I kind of became a leader through that online medium because I didn't have an outlet to do that in real life. You know, Six was this courageous character that could take on the world. In real life, I was just kind of lame. Robots gotta wait too. And when I came out to California, I had identity theft, and they told me basically the only way I can get around that is to legally change my name or to freeze my credit for the rest of my life. And they said the change your name thing kind of as a joke. But I was like, "Fuck it, I'm gonna become this online character." Like, I wanted to, you know, embody and almost like create this character in real life.

Six and his team at REC want to take these bots and pair them with virtual reality technology. The robot pilot would get into a virtual cockpit initiate moves, and have the robot execute them.

You're coming from the gaming world, the VR world. You have all these thoughts going around in your head and then, yeah, how do you sort of end up here with the idea for this company?

You know, so I started to see these videos of people teleop-ing humanoids, and then I kind of do the thing where like, you know, is this— are we close to an inflection point or is this going to be like the standard thing in tech where people get hyped out? But, you know, it doesn't actually happen. And so I bought a $100,000— so this guy over here, this older one, but the same model as this, $100,000. My mom at the time, I was like, Mom, do I get a house or do I get these robots? And she's like, please, please get a house. You need to grow up. And I was like, fuck it, I'm getting these big-ass robots. New robot day. It took about 2 months to get it. They told me when I received it that I was the first person at a residence that got one of these robots.

Instead of like a university.

Instead of a university of an R&D lab. They were like, what the fuck is this guy doing with this $100,000 robot? The thing is, is I felt there was something there, but I had to like just figure it out. So I just started posting about it about, you know, 6 and a half months ago. I took a picture of it and I was like, you know, I just bought this humanoid that costs as much as a luxury car. What do I do with it? And everybody who responded was basically like, "You need to fight it or you need to fuck it." I'm sorry. Like, I'm just— that's how everybody responded, right?

You weren't going to fuck it. You had those experiences.

I mean, the Japanese can do that.

So, you know, you had to fight it.

Yeah, yeah.

That was the last option then.

I made a video where I hit it with a pillow, right? And people were like, "Why are you hitting the robot with a pillow?" You know, like all this like emotional connection. I was like, you know, that is it. When someone looks at a humanoid robot, they imagine a human in its place. And that emotional connection and the type of media that you can create out of that is just significantly more valuable.

And then once you decide you're gonna fight 'em, then it was like, how are we gonna, how are we gonna do that?

Taking pieces off every bot in there.

We have of course had BattleBots for decades, but those were mostly ground blowers and could get gimmicky.

I love BattleBots, but BattleBots had this issue where they just kind of like let anybody do anything. And in the beginning that was cool, but then you got like saws versus, you know, people who had hammers and like, it was just like wild, right? But what ended up happening is the robot that won everything was a fucking cheese wedge.

Because it flips.

It would literally go under, flip it, and then it hit like the side saw or something. And the second that become the meta of like the winning robot is a cheese wedge, everybody's like, "Mmm, well that's lame." REC thinks we're in a new era.

It's playing off the rise of humanoid robots. The US has some from Tesla, Figure, and others. China has even more, and it just held the Robot Olympics, where there were, in fact, robots boxing.

China is ahead in production. They're ahead in engineering. That's just have to accept it. China is behind in media. The US is still the cultural battleground for the world.

Yeah.

And I think that that culture is going to make it so the winner of the robot fights will be American, but probably using Chinese robots.

There is a funny part of this story, at least to me, which is like, we're doing this, but definitely not with American robots. I mean, these are all Chinese robots.

There is a China backdoor in all of them.

Yeah.

I had a concept trailer that I came out with, with the original announcement of Wreck. The meta concept was US versus China. I do think it's going to become a very patriotic thing at some point where it's going to be something like, you know, the Optimus versus the Unitree, and it'll literally be like state-level engineers ensuring that they win. If you could say, hey, Elon, you have a chance to put your Optimus in a ring versus the number one humanoid robot in China, and have it broadcast to the whole world, he would take that instantly.

The first underground robot fights in the US kicked off a couple months ago. They're being run by the Ultimate Fighting Bots, or UFB League. They mostly use these child-sized machines from a Chinese company called Booster Robotics. Six took first place in the initial event and then became a Joe Rogan-type announcer figure in the second.

Robots still need people. They're still useful tools.

The UFB founders have done the most so far to get this going as a sport.

Oh!

Oh! Oh!

Six's vision though is even grander. He wants to make robots that have much more sophisticated moves. And he wants to create a mainstream combat sport. Don't let your finances beat you up. Switch to Brex and let its smart software battle your expenses for you.

I got into VR and I was really interested in the medium, but it was, it was very inaccessible. My biggest thing was to, okay, this is a really cool medium, but no one knows how cool it is. How do I communicate that? How do I show the world that? And so I built this technology that we call Live, and basically it's real-time VFX where you can see the person inside of VR. And that became the inflection point for consumer adoption of VR, where if you ever see these like super viral Beat Saber videos where the person is inside of VR and you can actually see exactly what they're doing, that was powered by Leap.

Yeah.

And so a very similar thing that I recognized here, which is, hey, this is really, really cool, but how big is this market? How many people have humanoids in the United States? Maybe a few hundred. So how do we create value or interest in this space when it's such a constrained market? The first concept we're doing of this is actually going to be using, uh, VR headsets for 3 things. It's going to be the end user inside, it's going to be the robot with a VR headset, and it's going to be the spectator who's controlling the camera view so they can see the holograms and everything, literally like using this like a selfie stick, moving this around to be able to see. The reason I'm so, so interested in this is so right now when people are doing robot fights, they have basically someone just standing there and they're holding a remote like this. It's not interesting. You've seen Real Steel, right? You have not seen Real Steel?

I'm sorry.

Dude, homework. After this, you have to go watch Real Steel. So Hugh Jackman is the main character. In the very, very end, he can't communicate with his robot anymore. The way he usually communicates is either remote or he's basically saying, "Left, right." whatever. The very end, you know, for cinematic appeal, it stops working. So he says, "Watch me," and he starts going like this, and the robot's going like this. And the final scene, he goes like this, and they show the robot, boom, knocking the robot out. And watching that, it's like showing the person and the robot connected. It's just going to be so much more interesting than any other medium that you do.

Now there's basically these grips over here that you use your middle fingers with.

Yeah.

So what you do is put your hands into the grips and then pull back once you do that.

Oh yeah. Oh, I punched.

So you do the uppercut with one hand and then you can also see a little holographic version of the robot in front of you and everything that you're doing, you'll see the robot body do.

Oh shit, you're right.

It's a floating representation of the robot. You'll be able to see the real world up until you're ready to fight. And once you hit that button, that's when you synchronize with the robot, and then you're no longer seeing the robot as a third person. You are now, you've become the robot.

I like my little dude.

Rec has a very, very long way to go to pull all this off, but it also has some things going for it. The company is made up of virtual reality experts. The Chief Technology Officer at Rec is Amanda Watson. She's got a history of doing groundbreaking things in VR, first at Oculus and then Meta. Watson helped make it possible for VR systems to tap in wirelessly to the computing horsepower on PCs. Now she's set to work training AI models on fighting moves.

Can I just do one thing first? I have a—

You can do anything.

Little ritual from theater that I do. It's superstition, but it— I don't know.

100%.

Let's do a—

Okay.

I like that. You're the Chief Technology Officer? Yes, sir. Okay. And so when I came in here the other day, it looked like a lot of the VR, the merging of the VR part to the robots, that seemed like your focus. Is that fair?

Um, it's really— it actually ends up not being my focus.

Okay.

I'm really excited about doing VR and streaming. Since it's the thing I have the most immediate ideas about. But a lot of my work for the last few weeks has been figuring out RL and policy training as well.

Okay, so reinforcement learning, so infusing AI into all of this.

Exactly. There are two applications to reinforcement learning that we care about. One is making sure the robot can stand up and walk. That's a combination of a few things, but reinforcement learning is one of the tools that we use to try to balance a bipedal robot. Especially when it's, you know, taking hits or something like that. The second part is trying to make movement seem human-like and natural. If I just tell the robot, "Hey, put your arm here," it's going to do something that might not pack a lot of punch and also won't look very good on a camera. It might go like, "Bleh." Okay. And we want it to do a punch. We want it to do a hook. We want it to both match what the human is trying to do and make it look like a good fight.

So how do you do that? When I see like the pick-and-place robots, there is a human teleoperator doing all the movements to train the robot on what that looks like. And it seems like this would be harder to just be able to throw a million punches and have the robot learn from that.

We have the ability to have the robot mirror whatever your arms are doing. We also have the ability to deploy basically an animation that looks like a punch that's very cinematic and looks real.

Okay.

What we'll probably end up doing is a combination of those two things.

Okay. And then the balance part seems—

Yeah, it's actually very complicated to keep these robots upright.

'Cause they kind of, it's not like they want to fall down, but they can fall down relatively easily. Yeah.

The results so far can be modest and also horrifying. But getting much cooler quickly. To get from this will require some major technology advancements and some major theater.

If someone who is 80 years old, someone who is 6 years old, they show someone go like this and the robot goes like this, context instantly. Anybody from any culture, from any place in the world, from 6 to 90 will say, I know what is happening. That is interesting.

Yeah, I do love the idea when you talk about like, like a 16-year-old girl just beating the crap out of someone.

Yes, I love it. I love it.

As a dude.

And I mean, it would make this sport unique.

It would be the first contact sport that's equal. You could have men versus women. You could have young people versus old people. You could have people from anywhere. It would be the first contact sport where you don't have to worry about the weight classes of the people, and you could still get a similar level of that, you know, physical connection that you get to the players as if it was a contact sport.

And it's that entertainment part potential that has me and Six the most excited.

Are you ready to get rocked?

That was well done.