来源：notes/sources/bilibili-2026-09-30-yu-kai-horizon-in-good-company/2026-09-30-yu-kai-horizon-in-good-company.original.md

Horizon Robotics CEO 余凯 In Good Company 播客访谈（Nicolai Tangen 主持）

Speaker: 余凯（Dr. Kai Yu，Horizon Robotics 创始人 / CEO）、Nicolai Tangen（Norges Bank Investment Management CEO）
Ingest Date: 2026-09-30
Source: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV18Aho6xEsE/
Duration: 字幕覆盖 00:00 - 00:47:04（视频总长约 94 分钟，本 srt 为已下载段落）
Subtitle Type: 英文 SRT（外部下载，773 条）
Format: 精校版（已加标点断句 + 轻度清洗口头语 + 修 ASR 错字；非逐字稿，原始逐字稿见同名 .original.srt / .original.md）

开场白

Yu Kai (opening teaser): In some sense, this is a terrible business — a heavy investment, very slow return. But in my view, sometimes a terrible business means a great business, because the entry barrier for all the other newcomers is extremely high.

Nicolai: Hi everybody, I’m Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. Ten years ago, we all assumed self-driving cars would come out of Silicon Valley. But today, the most advanced cars on the road are Chinese, and Western car makers are going to China to buy the technology.

Nobody sits closer to this shift than my guest, Yu Kai, who’s the founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics — which supplies the chips and software that let Chinese cars drive themselves. One of China’s leading AI scientists before he became an entrepreneur, few people can explain better how China got there and where it goes next. So, Kai, welcome.

Yu Kai: Hi, Nicolai.

一、地平线做什么

Nicolai: Let’s just start with a simple question. What does Horizon Robotics do?

Yu Kai: Well, essentially what we are doing is the computing platform for all generic robots — so including self-driving cars. But of course, our current business is nearly 100% focused on passenger vehicles.

Nicolai: So if I sit in a car that you supply into, what does your chip do?

Yu Kai: Essentially it’s running the software all the way from camera perception to trajectory planning and control. It’s kind of like the brain for all the cars.

Nicolai: Now your chips run roughly one out of four cars in China.

Yu Kai: Just tell me — one out of three. I think that’s the latest track record. Thank you.

Nicolai: Who are your customers?

Yu Kai: The major Chinese OEMs — like BYD, Geely, Chery, Changan, and Great Wall. And also some of the global OEMs — like Volkswagen, Toyota, Suzuki. Quite a few local domestic and global players.

Nicolai: Who do you compete with?

Yu Kai: Oh, very good question. Mobileye, Huawei, and quite a few domestic players like Black Sesame — I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of that. And Qualcomm, MediaTek, Texas Instruments, Renesas, NXP. Quite a lot of global and China technology companies.

二、为什么是地平线

Nicolai: Why are you the best?

Yu Kai: A very good question. Really, because we are very focused. We focus on this single one thing — to enable automatic driving, all the way to robotics. We are not doing anything else. So the intensity of focus is one thing. The other thing, fundamentally, is our vision and mission.

If you look at the name of our company — eleven years ago when we founded this company, Horizon Robotics — back then in China there was even no such a business at all; even the EV business was just starting. We had this vision, which was not an existing opportunity. We envisioned that in the future the world will be full of all kinds of different robots — working in a farming field, on a manufacturing assembly line, in a logistics warehouse, household service, elderly care, and of course self-driving cars. So we envisioned there should be a unifying platform, just like Windows and Intel did for personal computing, just like ARM and Android did for mobile computing. We envisioned a future computing platform that is generic for all kinds of robotics across different verticals.

Nicolai: When exactly did the vision hit you? In the shower, or working on a mountain?

Yu Kai: That’s a very good question. The vision actually hit me — I didn’t find this opportunity, I found this vision. I’ve been working in machine learning for over thirty years. Since my early days as a junior student in college, I by chance read a book about machine learning, and I was so amazed that it’s so fantastic: to develop a computer algorithm that one day can be like a human brain, getting smarter and smarter through experience, by learning more and more from data. So I decided to devote my whole career into this single subject — machine learning.

That was for my undergraduate thesis, my master’s thesis, my PhD, and my first job back at Siemens — and later in Silicon Valley, joining NEC Labs, and then joining Baidu, and then founding Horizon Robotics. I changed locations, I changed roles — from individual researcher, to team leader, to head of a research lab, to founder of a technology company. But there’s one thing that never changed: my mission and my vision to develop machine learning algorithms to make machines getting smarter and smarter.

三、为什么不自己造车

Nicolai: Two companies we’ve had on the podcast — XPeng and Xiaomi — they also make phones, cars, in addition to chips. Why did you decide never to build a car?

Yu Kai: I always position ourselves as going to be like Microsoft and Intel — not for PC, but for robots. I think a platform, an enabling platform, is a much more interesting position, not just in terms of the business model, but also in terms of the impact you can make to the whole world.

For example, back in the days of personal computing — Windows and Intel, they are not just enabling Lenovo or Dell; they actually helped the entire mankind, a new kind of technology civilization, a new era of technology. The personal computer enabled all the white-collar people to dramatically increase their productivity — that’s an amazing impact. XPeng, they actually maybe help one brand to become very appealing, very attractive to consumers. But I want to enable and help other brands, other cars.

Nicolai: Is it difficult to build a car?

Yu Kai: Yeah, of course.

Nicolai: But you have the technology, you have the chips. If I asked you to build a car, how long would it take?

Yu Kai: I wanted to achieve “Horizon Inside.” I think that’s a much bigger dream, much more interesting for me. I don’t want to be a car maker; I want to help more car brands to become more attractive.

四、中国市场的残酷竞争

Nicolai: Now the Chinese car market is brutally competitive. What is driving the Chinese car market just now? Is it price, intelligence?

Yu Kai: The current Chinese car market is really crazy. You don’t see any market like this anywhere. There are probably sixty to seventy different car brands, and for the first half of this year, more than five hundred eighty new car models launched. It’s an extremely tough market.

But the market is really driven by competition. On the other hand, it’s also driven by consumer demand. Consumers are expecting more and more smart features — automatic parking, autonomous driving, more fancy entertainment assistance. All of those factors are driving the market, not just competitive but also very innovative.

Nicolai: What does it do to Chinese manufacturers, when they have such strong competition at home — when they get out to, let’s say, Europe, is it easy-peasy to compete?

Yu Kai: We position ourselves not first — we are not competing with any car makers; we are actually enabling them, helping them. We are building strong partnerships with all the car makers and ecosystem partners, including automotive suppliers — for example, Bosch, Denso, and many other global and local suppliers.

Our philosophy is really to make friends and build long-term trust with our customers and partners. Essentially, this is fundamentally in the gene of our company. We don’t have too much culture from the competition perspective; we’re more about what kind of value we can create.

But luckily, if you look at our business, fundamentally compared to those car makers, we are not so crowded. In China, pretty much the top three players for automotive computing have consolidated to NVIDIA, Huawei, and Horizon Robotics. I’m very proud of that — partially because we chose a position where the business has an extremely high entry barrier. It’s not like a bunch of guys with VC funding can easily get into this business, because this is all mission-critical automotive electronics; it has to have the highest standard for quality and safety.

五、”糟糕的生意”反而是好生意

Yu Kai: Let’s say we are doing this chip design for auto models. It’s not like a consumer type of silicon; it has to go through all the regulations and tough qualification and testing processes. Normally if we initiate a new project, a new generation of project, it will take three to four years to get the product — the chip and the solution — ready for car makers. Then, if luckily enough we win a new nomination from one car maker, we need to also go through the cycle of production for the car platforms — that’s another three to five years in China, two years in Europe, a layer slower, typically five years globally. So think about it: it’s at least five to eight years for the whole cycle.

In some sense, this is a terrible business — a heavy investment, very slow return. But in my view, sometimes a terrible business means a great business, because the entry barrier for all the other newcomers is extremely high. And a good business is something where you can sleep well overnight. That’s my opinion.

六、自动驾驶的三步路线图

Nicolai: Talking about sleeping well, the autonomous journey — you speak between hands-off, eyes-off, mind-off. These are three steps a car will go through. In January last year you put dates on them. So we’ll have eyes-off in three years?

Yu Kai: Absolutely. I said that three years ago — we’ll have eyes-off.

Nicolai: Where are we today?

Yu Kai: We are in very good progress. In the industry, they have the standard Level 3, Level 4, Level 5 — but from the engineering standpoint, for consumers, they have no clue.

Nicolai: What is Level 3?

Yu Kai: I always try to connect our technology and product to something my mom can understand. That’s my way to interpret the technology stages: hands-free, hands-off, eyes-off, and mind-off.

Nicolai: So what would you tell your mom right now?

Yu Kai: Right now, we are in very good progress to achieve fully hands-off. I made a statement last year: by the end of 2028, we’re going to achieve fully hands-off; by the end of 2030, achieve fully eyes-off; and by the end of 2035, 100% mind-off — basically you can sleep in your running car. We are in very good progress.

Our latest product — the software stack called Horizon SuperDrive, running on our Journey 6T SoC — is essentially fully hands-free. It’s like a smarter version of automatic transmission. Over the last twenty years, the whole car industry evolved from manual transmission, where you need to control all the gears, into automatic transmission. Now I call this getting into the smarter version of automatic transmission — you just need to stare ahead and nothing else; you need to take care.

Nicolai: What is lacking? What part of the technology are you seeing as the critical element you’ve left?

Yu Kai: We need much bigger road tests, and we need much better numbers for statistics to prove that the technology is safe enough to claim eyes-off. We are in very good progress approaching hands-off, but we need much bigger road tests to prove eyes-off.

七、自研 AI 模型

Nicolai: Do you build your own AI models?

Yu Kai: Sure, the self-driving model. Remember we position ourselves as Intel — not just Intel. We position as Wintel. And I think Wintel is an amazing business model.

Nicolai: Where is the future breakthrough going to come from? Is it the model, the data?

Yu Kai: It’s a combination of three factors together. This is the typical formula of today’s business: you need much bigger compute running locally on the vehicle; you need continuously collecting bigger and bigger data — but meaningful data, not just quantity but also quality, meaning many meaningful corner cases; and you need bigger and bigger models in terms of number of parameters.

八、公司文化：不考核工时

Nicolai: How many people are in the company? What do they do?

Yu Kai: We are a very technology-savvy company. Most of our employees are engineers — either software engineers or hardware engineers. And they work extremely hard.

Nicolai: You don’t produce the chips; you outsource the production, right?

Yu Kai: Actually, on the hardware side we are a typical fabless company. We design the chip but we don’t manufacture the chip; we outsource to our partners. We also developed the software, the end-to-end neural network for self-driving.

Nicolai: What does “working hard” mean?

Yu Kai: We have a typical technology culture. We don’t have rules or policies like “you need to come to work at 8 AM.” Actually, typically most of our engineers come to work around 10 AM, and they freely organize their working time. There’s no rule like “before which time you are not supposed to leave the office.” The sense of ownership of our engineers is very high.

Nicolai: How long days do you think on average they work?

Yu Kai: Actually I have no clue. Quite some of our engineers even work from home. We don’t measure that by working hours. I know some Chinese companies measure by working hours; we never do. We care about how far we can achieve.

九、中国速度：两年 vs 五年

Nicolai: You said the model cycle time in China is two years, whereas it’s five years in Europe. What explains the difference?

Yu Kai: As far as I know, because I work with so many Chinese OEMs — yes, they are working extremely hard. They have a very strong sense of competition that urges them to try all the ways to improve the process. They don’t have summer vacations like thirty or forty working days during the summer. They work really hard.

Nicolai: What’s the key to innovation? How do you create a really innovative culture?

Yu Kai: First of all, we are a company driven by vision; we are not opportunity-driven, we are not competition-driven. We work on this because we really want to push the boundary of the entire society and industry. Self-motivation is very important. We don’t want to be the same as any other company; we don’t want to do the sort of things other companies are doing. That’s also why our business is not so crowded in China.

This is a real phenomenon: in China, if any business looks even somewhat interesting — not even profitable, just somewhat interesting — typically hundreds of companies jump in to compete. It’s crazy. Look at AI, embodied AI — so many companies, and so many car companies. We are working on something we believe in, but not necessarily other people love to jump into.

Nicolai: With all these companies jumping into these sectors, what does it mean in terms of the supply chain and the choices you have as a manufacturer? How does it all go together?

Yu Kai: We just choose the best to work with, because we don’t have any luxury — something we need to be very innovative on, for example the chip architecture, the compiler, the algorithm. Some things we respect the tradition very much, because this is really a life-and-death, mission-critical matter: if any car accident happens, it’s not just impacting the driver or passenger; it’s sometimes a public safety issue. So we need to be religiously respecting tradition. We just choose the best partner.

十、中国供应链：德国朋友的”仙境”

Nicolai: What advantage do you think Chinese auto manufacturers now have from that breadth and depth of supply chain, which we don’t have in Europe?

Yu Kai: I worked very closely with many global automotive companies like Bosch, Denso, Volkswagen. I talked to them about that. It turned out that over the last maybe two decades, China has become a country where the supply chain of components and technologies is so rich.

One of my friends, a German, told me he thinks China nowadays is like a wonderland for supply chain: no matter what kind of new ideas you have, you can always find partners and suppliers in China — either to supply the technology component to you, or to work with you to fulfill your requirement. And the speed is incredible. That gave China an overall fantastic environment to innovate. The kind of overall ecosystem is there.

You don’t need to write an email to somewhere else; you just make a phone call or send a WeChat message, or take a flight from Beijing to Shenzhen — just three hours. Including myself and all of my friends, we travel so frequently within China; we take the whole of China as one village.

十一、大众裁员：中欧需要新心态

Nicolai: When you see news such as Volkswagen laying off one hundred thousand people, what reflections do you have?

Yu Kai: We position ourselves as a strong partner to Volkswagen and many other global companies, because we don’t face any competition. In Europe, if you look at semiconductor companies like Infineon, NXP, and STMicroelectronics — we are not competing with them, because their focus is on analog chips, MCUs, those kind of strengths. But we are working on computing for cars, which is exactly what they’re not doing. So in that sense, we find very strong synergy to work together.

In my view, both European friends and the Chinese need to change the mindset. For example, several decades ago, the general pattern was global companies trying to make money from China. Nowadays that motive is getting very difficult. And now there could be some other mindset: Chinese companies now have very competitive products, we get into Europe to take their market shares and make money from them — that’s also not healthy.

We all need to embrace a new mindset. The new opportunity is for us to work together, to explore new markets, to launch more competitive products, to make profit, to create value globally. This is the kind of mindset I share deeply with many of my friends in Germany, in France, and in other countries.

十二、车就是机器人

Nicolai: Your company is called Horizon Robotics. How far is a car from a robot?

Yu Kai: Still a little long way to go, but not that far. As I said, by the end of 2028, all passenger vehicles in China will be hands-free. So it’s already kind of semi-robots.

Nicolai: What is your business going to be in robotics?

Yu Kai: Actually we are already a leading player in China right now — one of the top two players for generic robotics computing. We are enabling a lot of robotics companies, supplying computing solutions to them.

Nicolai: What’s the overlap in technology and systems between self-driving cars and humanoid robots?

Yu Kai: That’s a very good question. I believe eventually the two businesses’ technology will really converge, and they eventually become a unified computing platform. Cars will become robots, no big difference. Cars will sense the environment, understand the intention of the pedestrians, surrounding traffic participants, understand the gesture of the policeman, and make decisions in very sophisticated traffic environments. Fundamentally, that’s no big difference from any other computing pattern of robots.

十三、人形机器人：五年内能否上量

Nicolai: Tell me about the speed of development of humanoid robots in China. What is crazy?

Yu Kai: Again, there are like hundreds of such companies, so intense. But I think all of them are still really a long way to go. If you look at autonomous driving — Horizon is probably the first autonomous driving startup in China — we’ve already been working here for eleven years and now we are top two. And now we’re top two in robotics. For humanoid robots, I think it will take many years to go.

Nicolai: What do you do inside the robot? What is your software?

Yu Kai: We supply chip solutions. For robots, we are not so much into the software; we are supplying chips to the robot companies.

Nicolai: When do you think we’ll have meaningful volumes of humanoid robots coming? Five years?

Yu Kai: I know I am a little bit conservative compared to many other guys. I try to be objective, and also partially — as a CEO, as a founder, I’m basically a technology guy — a little bit more conservative and objective.

Nicolai: What will you personally use them for?

Yu Kai: I think the number one scenario is home service. We enjoy all the fun things, but we don’t enjoy many of the tedious work — like cleaning tables after dinner. Sometimes we like cooking, but we don’t like cleaning.

Nicolai: I have a theory that divorce rates will go down when you don’t have to do boring things anymore.

Yu Kai: Exactly. There is another thing: China is facing a very terrible aging society, and it’s coming so quickly, quite unexpectedly. The issue is getting worse actually, compared to Europe and even Japan. What about elderly care? What about the labor shortage? This is going to be a huge social and economic challenge for China.

十四、赢下 EV 战，就赢下机器人战

Nicolai: What’s the overlapping supply chain between self-driving cars and robotics?

Yu Kai: I think almost the same. If you win the EV race, you’ll win the robotics race. That’s fundamentally what I believe. My argument is: if you’re a winner for the automotive supply chain, you’re going to be a winner for robotics.

If you look at the actuators, mechanical things, all the sensors — lasers, radars — currently applied to cars. Because the car business is big volume, suppliers will continuously improve the cost structure, the performance, make it very compact. So those guys will be in a very strong position for robotics — just like many companies that were winners for the mobile phone supply chain later became extremely competitive for the generic IoT business.

Nicolai: Stupid question, but where does that leave the race between China and the US in robotics?

Yu Kai: I don’t like this view of looking at this game. I don’t know this kind of zero-sum game. I’m not sure this is the truth. China is very strong in manufacturing. If the robotics industry in the US — if they work with the China ecosystem, they could become more innovative and innovate at a much faster pace. If they only rely on their own supply chain or manufacturing, they will end up with slower technology innovation. So it really makes sense to always find the synergy to work together and create value for the global together.

十五、机器人把自由还给人

Nicolai: What is a city going to be like in ten to twenty years?

Yu Kai: I’m a huge fan of ancient Greek culture and history. In July I’ve been to Athens again; I’ve been there many times. It was a very golden age, where people really enjoyed free thinking, free exchange of ideas, so many inspiring philosophers making a huge impact on human civilization. They were free of labor work. I think civilization is so much related to the freedom of humans.

If we have all the robots to do all the tedious and sometimes dangerous work, we can have more time — like you and me right now, chatting, exchanging ideas, hanging around for other things, more time for entertainment, more time for research, more time for arts, even more time for outings. That would be great.

If you look at today, the traffic jam in Beijing and Shanghai — if you ever come to China, it’s terrible. Very often it’s a one-way commute from home to office; you’re stuck in traffic for almost two hours, and you waste two hours of your life doing nothing because you need 100% focus staring at the wheel. Are you the master of the car? No, in that situation you are a slave of the car, because you don’t have choice.

The essence of robotics is to keep freedom, give the choice back to humans — the human can make a choice to do something or not doing something.

Nicolai: And what will the city look like physically?

Yu Kai: Even today, Beijing housing prices differ from school district to school district, from region to region, quite differently. Maybe in ten years, housing prices won’t be so different, because essentially every car is like a moving house; you have much more freedom, and you don’t have such kind of anxiety about distance. So the city will be very different, drastically different in traffic.

Today, people are fighting for the lanes, the parking lots. If everything is self-driving, the efficiency of the roads will be much higher, because the cars are coordinated rather than competing against each other. The efficiency of traffic will be ten times improved. The environment will be much nicer — much less noise, much less stress, much less anxiety. The city will be much better.

十六、雅典：文化意味着一切

Nicolai: Take me back one second to your Athens visit. When you go up to the Acropolis and stand there in front of the Parthenon, what do you think?

Yu Kai: It’s stunning. I’m so amazed. I think culture means everything. Human thinking is unbounded. We can do something much greater than what we can imagine today. It’s such an amazing thing. And in some sense, I think it’s a shame — it’s a shame that today, in this world, we are still doing so many terrible things, making the world a huge mess. It’s a shame we are not doing anything greater than the ancient Greek people.

十七、个人失败、禅与当下

Nicolai: Personal question: what’s your biggest personal failure in life?

Yu Kai: To be honest, I’m not a very pessimistic guy. If I ever encounter any frustration or failure, I always turn into a new page and almost immediately forget. I have a very good ability to forget bad things. I’m an insanely optimistic guy. And I care about the power of now; I’m following the philosophy of Zen — the Chinese ancient Buddhism philosophy — really carrying the power of now.

Nicolai: What’s the key to the Zen philosophy for you?

Yu Kai: Happiness is so simple. According to one of the greatest monks in history, he said many people are having a miserable life just because: when they are supposed to sleep, they think about work; when they are working, they are thinking about sleeping. The essence of happiness is very simple: when you are working, just focus on working; when you are sleeping, just sleep.

I focus the power of now because I’m running this company, Horizon Robotics. I just focus on this and nothing else — nothing more, nothing less, just doing this whole thing.

Nicolai: What’s something about you that most people don’t know?

Yu Kai: There’s one thing I’m not very satisfied with myself: my weight. I just have too good an appetite. I love food so much. This is really something not so good.

Nicolai: What do you read?

Yu Kai: I’m reading one book — I forgot the name. It tells the story about three companies: Microsoft, Intel, and Apple. It’s about the kind of decisions and strategies they’ve been making to create the era of personal computing. Strategic thinking.

十八、给年轻人的建议

Nicolai: What’s your advice to young people?

Yu Kai: Doing what you love, and loving what you’re doing — probably equally important. Many people always try to dream to do what they love, but in reality you are not always so lucky. Sometimes you need to accept, sometimes accommodate. But it’s nothing personal; stick with it. Enjoy whatever you have right now is also a very good attitude. Sometimes you love what you are supposed to do, or what you are requested to do, and then maybe this whole thing can become something you really love to do. We need to have such an attitude: love what we do, and do what we love.

Nicolai: Well, I think that’s a wonderful place to end. Thank you. What an incredible story, what an incredible company. I love your life philosophy. There is so much to take away from this.

Yu Kai: Thank you.

原始素材