Inside the Billion-Dollar Startup Bringing AI Into the Physical World

Physical Intelligence is a startup that aims to give robots a profound artificial intelligence upgrade.

Despite amazing AI advances in recent years , nobody has figured out how to make robots particularly clever or capable.

The startup believes it can give robots humanlike understanding of the physical world and dexterity by feeding sensor and motion data from robots performing demonstrations into its master AI model.

Achiechiechieving a breakthrough in physical intelligence might require exponentially more data.

Physical Intelligence co-founder Quan Vuong corralled researchers at 21 different institutions to train 22 different robot arms on a range of tasks using the same single transformer model.

The company has contributed to both Physical Intelligence’s seed investment and its latest investment through its startup fund.

Physical Intelligence has developed its first model using a huge amount of training data on more than 50 complex common household tasks.

The startup hopes to gather a lot more data by working with other companies such as ecommerce and manufacturing firms that have robots doing a variety of things.

Physical Intelligence hopes to develop custom hardware, such as the webcam-equipped pincer.