US firm teaching humanoid robot brains to do laundry, make coffee, light candles

Physical Intelligence (PI), a Silicon Valley robotics startup, is advancing the development of humanoid robots capable of learning and reliably performing complex physical tasks such as folding laundry, making coffee, and lighting candles. The company recently raised $400 million from investors including OpenAI and Jeff Bezos, valuing it above $2 billion. PI’s innovation centers on a new training method called Recap (Reinforcement Learning with Experience and Corrections via Advantage-conditioned Policies), which enables robots to learn more like humans—through instruction, correction, and autonomous practice—addressing a key challenge in robotics where small errors during task execution often compound and cause failure. Recap enhances robot learning by incorporating corrective human interventions when errors occur and by allowing the robot to evaluate its own actions using reinforcement learning. This approach uses a value function to assign credit or blame to specific moves, enabling the system to learn from imperfect experiences rather than discarding them. PI’s vision-language-action model, π*0.6, trained with Rec