Last week, artificial intelligence startup Physical Intelligence discovered his first general robot model, π₀ (pi-zero), which can do everything from cleaning the table after dinner to folding laundry. At the beginning of this year, the company was rated with 400 million dollars.
Now, a Monday's report it shows that the startup has achieved unicorn statussurpassing a $1 billion valuation after raising $400 million, at a $2.4 billion valuation, from investors like Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, and Thrive Capital.
The goal of Physical Intelligence is to bring general-purpose AI into the real world with robotics, according to its website. It only took eight months for him develop the π₀ robot model, which the startup says is the “first step” toward a future in which robots process and perform tasks as easily as AI chatbots that respond to requests.
“Our mission at Physical Intelligence is to develop foundational models that can control any robot to perform any task,” the startup. wrote in a blog post. “Our experiments so far show that such models can control a variety of robots and perform tasks that no previous robot learning system has successfully performed.”
Related: Meet Figure 02, 'The Most Advanced Humanoid Robot on the Market' Powered by Jeff Bezos, OpenAI
What can robots do?
A video released last week shows a π₀ robot taking clothes out of a dryer, putting them in a basket, placing the basket next to a table, and then taking the clothes out one by one and folding them into a neat stack.
Two π₀ robots also work together to load coffee into a coffee grinder: One robot holds open the bag of coffee beans while the other takes the beans out. The same two robots pick up a cardboard box.
Another robot π₀ cleans up after dinner by picking up wine glasses, utensils and delicate plates and placing them in a bin. The robot knows the difference between what should go in the trash, like food scraps, and what should be washed, like a plate, and places each in the appropriate container.
At Physical Intelligence (π) our mission is to bring general purpose AI to the physical world.
We are excited to show the first step towards this mission – our first general model π₀ ? ?
Paper, blog, uncut videos: https://t.co/XZ4Luk8Dci pic.twitter.com/XHCu1xZJdq
— Physical Intelligence (@physical_int) October 31, 2024
Although these initial results show robots “in their infancy,” they “paint a promising picture” of the future of AI robotics, according to to physical intelligence.
Other robotics startups in the space include Figures AI, a $2.6 billion company backed by Jeff Bezos, Microsoft and OpenAI which develops humanoid robots.
Related: This company built a new kind of robot: 'Moves the way people move'