A modern-day Rosey from the animated TV series “The Jetsons” just got a major step closer to becoming a household fixture.
Physical Intelligence, which plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) to create brains for robotic maids, on Monday said it raised $400 million in funding led by Amazon.com Inc. Chairman Jeff Bezos, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, setting the startup’s market value at a hefty $2 billion.
The San Francisco-based company has developed and demonstrated an AI model capable of doing a wide range of home chores, ranging from unloading the dryer and folding laundry to bussing cluttered tables, after being trained on an unprecedented amount of data. Ultimately, the concept raises the real possibility of bringing generative AI like ChatGPT into the physical world.
“We have a recipe that is very general, that can take advantage of data from many different embodiments, from many different robot types, and which is similar to how people train language models,” company CEO Karol Hausman recently told Wired.
According to Physical Intelligence’s blog: “Over the past eight months, we’ve developed a general-purpose robot foundation model that we call π0 (pi-zero). We believe this is a first step toward our long-term goal of developing artificial physical intelligence, so that users can simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants. Like LLMs, our model is trained on broad and diverse data and can follow various text instructions. Unlike LLMs, it spans images, text and actions and acquires physical intelligence by training on embodied experience from robots, learning to directly output low-level motor commands via a novel architecture. It can control a variety of different robots, and can either be prompted to carry out the desired task, or fine-tuned to specialize it to challenging application scenarios. An extended article on our work can be found here.”
The company’s web site is chock full of videos showing its robots at work. The household chores feature a pair of robot arms grabbing and folding laundry, another robot arm clearing a table spilling over with plates and cups, and a wheeled robot pulling clothes out of a dryer. Some of the tasks display humanlike abilities, such as shaking T-shirts to get them to lie flat before folding.
Perhaps the most dazzling feat shows a robot adroitly building a cardboard box.
