At 19, Teddy Warner is channeling his lifelong passion for robotics into founding his own company, Intempus. The company is developing technology to make robots more human-like by equipping them with emotional expression capabilities. This innovation aims to enhance human-robot interaction and improve the predictability of robotic actions. By integrating human-like responses, Intempus seeks to generate data that can better train AI models.
Warner's inspiration for Intempus emerged during his stint at the AI research lab, Midjourney. He noticed the difficulty in achieving spatial reasoning in AI models due to the lack of such reasoning in the data from existing robots. Warner believes that robots need an intermediate physiological state to bridge the gap between observation and action, similar to humans and animals.
Initially, Warner experimented with fMRI data but found success using sweat data, which quickly enabled emotional modeling in robots. His research expanded to include other physiological data like body temperature and heart rate. Founded in September 2024, Intempus has already partnered with seven enterprise-level robotics companies and joined Peter Thiel's Thiel Fellowship for young entrepreneurs.
Warner plans to build a team and test the developed technologies with humans, with aspirations to eventually create robots that inherently convey emotions and intentions.
