Leonardo Giusti: Archetype AI's co-founder on physical AI and the limits of the chatbot

Leonardo Giusti has spent his career in the spaces between disciplines — between art and science, between research and product, between the physical world and the digital one. It’s not a conventional design path, but it’s one that led him to work most designers never get near. This is a preview of a premium episode. Find the full episode on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/leonardo-giusti Leonardo is the co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Archetype AI, a company building foundation models trained not on text or images, but on the continuous stream of sensor data flowing from the real world, like factories, power grids, and city intersections. Before that, he spent nearly seven years at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, where he led design on Project Soli — a miniature radar chip that taught devices to understand human gesture and presence — and Project Jacquard, which wove interactivity into everyday objects like Levi’s jackets and YSL bags. He holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the University of Florence and spent years as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Design Lab. He’s also filed more than 30 patents (!). What makes Leonardo’s thinking distinctive is his insistence that the metaphors we use to describe AI shape everything — how we build it, how we regulate it, and who it ends up serving. He’s skeptical of the dominant vision of AI as an autonomous agent that does things for us, and is pushing toward something different: AI as a tool we think with. In this conversation, we get into his unusual path to design through cognitive science and robotics, what it actually means to treat emerging technology as a design material, why the chatbot is a primitive interface for the physical world, and why he believes augmenting human intelligence might be the most important design challenge of our time. Bio Leonardo Giusti, Ph.D., is an award-winning design and research director. With over 15 years of experience, he excels in transforming R&D projects into innovative hardware, software, and AI products. Prior to Archetype AI, Leonardo was the Head of Design at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects, UX Design and Product Lead at Samsung Design and R&D and interaction design lead at MIT Design Lab. Leonardo was a Post-doctoral Associate at MIT Design Labs and completed his Ph.D, in human-computer interaction at the University of Florence. He has filed more than 30 patents, and published more than 40 scientific papers. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Fast Company and other recognized magazines.