Last week, AI startup Physical Intelligence unveiled its first general robot model, π₀ (pi-zero), which can do everything from clearing the table after dinner to folding the laundry. Earlier this year, the company was valued at $400 million.
Now, a Monday report shows that the startup has reached unicorn status, surpassing a $1 billion valuation after raising $400 million, at a valuation of $2.4 billion, from investors like Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, and Thrive Capital.
Physical Intelligence’s goal is to bring general-purpose AI into the real world with robotics, according to its website. It only took them eight months to develop the robot model π₀, which the startup says is the “first step” towards a future in which robots process and perform tasks with as much ease as AI chatbots answering prompts.
“Our mission at Physical Intelligence is to develop foundation 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 prior robot learning system has done successfully.”
Related: Meet Figure 02, the ‘Most Advanced Humanoid Robot on the Market’ Backed By Jeff Bezos, OpenAI
What Can the 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 the bag of coffee beans open while the other scoops the beans out. The same two robots assemble a cardboard box.
Yet another π₀ robot clears up after dinner by picking up delicate wineglasses, utensils, and plates and placing them into a bin. The robot recognizes the difference between what needs to go in the trash, like food scraps, and what needs to be washed, like a plate, and places each into its appropriate container.
At Physical Intelligence (π) our mission is to bring general-purpose AI into the physical world.
We’re excited to show the first step towards this mission – our first generalist model π₀ ? ?
Paper, blog, uncut videos: https://t.co/XZ4Luk8Dci pic.twitter.com/XHCu1xZJdq
— Physical Intelligence (@physical_int) October 31, 2024
Though these initial results show the robots “in their infancy,” they “paint a promising picture” of the future of AI robotics, according to Physical Intelligence.
Other robotics startups in the space include Figure AI, a $2.6 billion company backed by Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, and OpenAI that develops humanoid robots.
Related: This Company Built a New Kind of Robot: ‘It Moves the Way People Move’