Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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The future of AI is physical. 

In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks to Nikolaus West, CEO of Rerun, about why the breakthrough required to get AI out of the lab and into the messy real world is blocked by poor data tooling. 

Nikolaus explains how Rerun solved this by adopting an Entity Component System (ECS), a data model built for games, to handle complex, multimodal, time-aware sensor data. This is the technology that makes solving previously impossible tasks, like flexible manipulation, suddenly feel "boring." 

Connect with us here: 

Nikolaus West: linkedin.com/in/nikolauswest
Rerun: linkedin.com/company/rerun-io
Lukas Biewald: linkedin.com/in/lbiewald
Weights & Biases: linkedin.com/company/wandb

00:00 Trailer
01:08 Exploring Rerun.ai and Its Innovations
11:36 The State of Robotics and AI
18:00 Practical Applications and Future of Robotics
31:25 Exploring Logging SDK and Visualization
32:06 API Design Tradeoffs and Data Model Redesigns
36:12 Customer Insights and Simulation vs. Real Data
42:36 Future of Robotics and Open Source Contributions