Fireside Chat with Alex Toshev
Join Rora for a conversation with Alex Toshev, Research Director at Wayve Labs, where he's building a new general robotics team focused on foundation intelligence for robot manipulation and mobility. Alex joins from Apple, where he co-led MM1, Apple's early family of multimodal LLMs, and then led research on generalist agents. Before that, he spent over a decade at Google, including six years helping build Google Robotics, where he co-led SayCan, which brought LLMs into robotic planning and won Best Innovation Paper at CoRL 2022. His earlier work pioneered deep learning for human pose estimation, object detection, and vision-language models, and his research has drawn more than 35,000 citations.
Now, Alex is starting a founding team in Wayve's Sunnyvale office, drawing on Wayve's foundation-model platform and a decade of experience deploying AI in physical environments with manufacturers and fleets like Nissan, Stellantis, and Uber. In this session, he'll share:
Alex's journey from Google Robotics and Apple ML Research to leading a new robotics effort at Wayve Labs
Why now is the moment for general-purpose robotics, and why Wayve's foundation-model approach to autonomy is a natural base for it
What it takes to build a robotics team from scratch, spanning hardware and software, data, model development, training, evaluation, and deployment
How Wayve Labs gives researchers the scale, data, compute, and freedom to pursue multi-year breakthroughs
Who he's looking to hire: people with experience across multimodal models, robotics, and robot learning, from strong researchers to strong engineers, generalists who want to touch the full stack and are hungry for a 0→1 experience; he is also looking for candidates to hire!
If that sounds like you, this session is a candid look at what Wayve Labs is building and why the founding chapter is the time to get involved.