Physical Intelligence, an artificial intelligence startup seeking to create brains for a wide variety of robots, announced Monday that it had raised $400 million in financing from major investors.
The round was led by Jeff Bezos, Amazon's executive chair, and venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Other investors include OpenAI, Redpoint Ventures and Bond.
The fundraising valued the company at about $2 billion, not including the new investments. That's significantly more than the $70 million that the startup, which was founded this year, had raised in seed financing.
The company wants to make foundational software that would work for any robot, instead of the traditional approach of creating software for specific machines and specific tasks.
"What we're doing is not just a brain for any particular robot," said Karol Hausman, the company's co-founder and CEO. "It's a single generalist brain that can control any robot."
It's a tricky task: Building such a model requires a huge amount of data on how to operate in the real world. Those information sets largely do not exist, compelling the company to compile its own. Its work has been aided by big leaps in AI models that can interpret visual data.
Among the company's co-founders are Hausman, a former robotics scientist at Google; Sergey Levine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Lachy Groom, an investor and former executive at payments giant Stripe.
In a paper published last week, Physical Intelligence showed how its software -- called π0, or pi-zero -- enabled robots to fold laundry, clear a table, flatten a box and more.
"It's a true generalist," Hausman said.
Physical Intelligence executives said that its software was closer to GPT-1, the first model published for chatbots by OpenAI, than to the more advanced brains that power ChatGPT.
Groom said that it was hard to predict the rate of progress: A ChatGPT-style breakthrough "could be far sooner than we expect, or it could definitely be far out."
The field of robotics AI is getting crowded, with players including Skild, which is also working on general-purpose robot AI; Figure AI, whose backers include OpenAI and Bezos; and Covariant, which focuses on industrial applications.
Amazon has a vested interest in the industry, and has been adding more robots in its operations as it seeks to drive down costs and get orders to customers faster. Tesla also has major AI ambitions, with Elon Musk recently saying that the company's humanoid robot would be "the biggest product ever of any kind."