Nandini Roy Choudhury, writer
Brief news
- Physical Intelligence, a San Francisco startup, raised $400 million, achieving a $2.4 billion valuation, with investors including Jeff Bezos and OpenAI.
- The company aims to integrate general-purpose AI into robotics, having developed a model over the past eight months.
- Their vision includes enabling robots to perform various tasks through simple user commands, similar to interactions with chatbots.
Detailed news
Physical Intelligence, a startup business that specializes in robots and is headquartered in San Francisco, has announced to CNBC on Monday that it has successfully funded $400 million at a post-money valuation of $2.4 billion.
According to a spokeswoman for Physical Intelligence, investors included Jeff Bezos, creator of Amazon, as well as OpenAI, Thrive Capital, and Lux Capital. It was also said that Bond Capital invested. In addition, Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures are named as investors on the website of the firm under consideration.
In March, Physical Intelligence conducted a seed round that allegedly brought in $70 million with a valuation of $400 million. The current valuation of the company is almost six times higher than the previous one. A number of former workers from companies such as Tesla, Google DeepMind, and X are currently employed by the company.
According to the website of the firm, its primary objective is to “bring general-purpose AI into the physical world.” In order to accomplish this objective, the company intends to build large-scale artificial intelligence models and algorithms that will be used to power robots. A “general-purpose” artificial intelligence model for robots was developed by the startup over the course of the last eight months, according to a blog post written by the business. Developing an artificial general intelligence is the ultimate objective of Physical Intelligence, and they expect that this model will be the first step toward achieving that goal. When it comes to a wide variety of jobs, artificial intelligence technology that is capable of equaling or surpassing human intelligence is referred to as artificial general intelligence (AGI).
The announcement comes only a few days after OpenAI introduced a search function within ChatGPT, its viral chatbot. This functionality places the artificial intelligence firm in a stronger position to compete with search engines such as Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Perplexity. Furthermore, OpenAI successfully completed its most recent investment round at a valuation of $157 billion in the previous month.
In the blog post, the startup company Physical Intelligence expressed its hope that one day customers would be able to “simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants,” as stated in the company’s vision statement. The company Physical Intelligence provides examples of how their technology may enable a robot to perform tasks such as doing laundry, busing tables, or putting together a package.
Source : CNBC News
