On a metallic door in San Francisco’s Mission District, a single character—“π”—offers a cryptic clue as to the virtuous circle of labor taking place beyond. The door opens to reveal furious activity involving both humans and machines. A woman uses two joysticks to operate a pair of tabletop robotic arms that carefully lift and fold T-shirts into a neat pile. Several larger robots move pantry items from one cluttered box to another. In one corner of the room a man operates a plastic pincer that fits over his wrist and has a webcam on top. Robot parts litter the room. The warehouse is home of Physical Intelligence, also known as PI or π (hence the symbol on the front door), a startup that aims to give robots a profound artificial intelligence upgrade. Such is the excitement and expectation around the company’s dream that investors are betting hundreds of millions that it will make the next earth-shaking breakthrough in the field of AI. Physical Intelligence last week announced it had raised $400 million from investors that include OpenAI and Jeff Bezos, at a valuation of over $2 billion.

Full story : How Physical Intelligence is trying to give robots a humanlike understanding of the physical world by feeding data from robots doing tasks into its AI model.