Physical Intelligence, Stripe veteran Lachy Groom’s latest bet, is building Silicon Valley’s buzziest robot brains

Physical Intelligence, co-founded by UC Berkeley associate professor Sergey Levine and led by Silicon Valley veteran Lachy Groom, is developing advanced robotic "brains" designed to enable robots to perform everyday tasks with human-like adaptability. Operating out of a modest San Francisco facility, the company uses off-the-shelf robotic arms priced around $3,500, emphasizing that sophisticated intelligence can compensate for relatively inexpensive hardware. Their approach involves training general-purpose robotic foundation models through continuous data collection from various environments, including warehouses, homes, and test kitchens. These models are then tested on tasks such as folding clothes or peeling vegetables, with the goal of enabling robots to generalize learned skills to new, unseen objects and challenges. The company’s work is likened to creating a "ChatGPT for robots," where the AI learns from diverse real-world interactions to improve its capabilities. Physical Intelligence’s experimental setup includes multiple robotic arms attempting mundane tasks, illustrating the iterative process of refining the models. Lachy Groom, a young entrepreneur with a background