Physical Intelligence raises $400M for foundation models for robotics

By Eugene Demaitre | November 4, 2024

Foundation models promise to give robots the ability to generalize actions from fewer examples than traditional artificial intelligence approaches. Physical Intelligence today announced that it has raised $400 million to continue its development of AI for a range of robots.

“What we’re doing is not just a brain for any particular robot,” Karol Hausman, co-founder and chief executive of Physical Intelligence, told The New York Times. “It’s a single generalist brain that can control any robot.”

The San Francisco-based company last week posted an explanation of its first generalist policy, which it claimed will make robots easier to program and use.

“To paraphrase Moravec’s paradox, winning a game of chess or discovering a new drug represent ‘easy’ problems for AI to solve, but folding a shirt or cleaning up a table requires solving some of the most difficult engineering problems ever conceived,” wrote Physical Intelligence.

“Our first step is π₀, a prototype model that combines large-scale multi-task and multi-robot data collection with a new network architecture to enable the most capable and dexterous generalist robot policy to date,” said the company. “While we believe this is only a small early step toward developing truly general-purpose robot models, we think it represents an exciting step that provides a glimpse of what is to come.”

It’s still early days for foundation models

Early demonstrations of such generalist robot policies include folding laundry, assembling boxes, and dynamically putting objects into containers. Sergey Levine, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, shared these videos during his keynote address on building robotic foundation models at RoboBusiness last month.

Physical Intelligence acknowledged that foundation models that can control any robot to perform any task “are still in their infancy.” It said it is working on the data and partnerships to pretrain these models and enable new levels of dexterity and physical capability.

Physical Intelligence’s full research paper is available online.

Venture capital sees potential in AI plus robots

Physical Intelligence raised $70 million in seed financing earlier this year, and its valuation has risen to $2 billion. Jeff Bezos, executive chairman of Amazon, led the company’s latest funding round, along with Thrive Capital and Lux Capital.

Physical Intelligence thanked its investors on its website: “We are grateful for the support and partnership of Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, OpenAI, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital.”

The company is currently hiring.

Other recent fundraising rounds supporting work to apply foundation models to robotics include $675 million for humanoid developer Figure AI, $300 million for Skild AI, $6.6 billion for OpenAI, $100 million for Collaborative Robotics, and Accenture’s plus more recent Canadian funding of Sanctuary AI.

More companies working on AI and robotics include Covariant AI, whose team was hired by Amazon; Intrinsic, which used NVIDIA models; and Vayu, which is developing delivery robots. Apptronik is also working with NVIDIA on a general-purpose foundation model for its Apollo humanoid.

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