Robot brain builders are pushing out of their GPT-2 era
Physical AI is one of the hottest sectors in venture investing, with companies raising billions to apply the tools that gave us Large Language Models to robotics. That excitement helped deliver a big IPO for Unitree, China’s leading robot maker, which saw the company valued at $66 billion after its arrival on China’s equivalent of the NASDAQ.
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Key Facts
- Fact 1: That excitement helped deliver a big IPO for Unitree, China’s leading robot maker, which saw the company valued at $66 billion after its arrival on China’s equivalent of the NASDAQ.
- Fact 2: The event has tripled in size since it kicked off in 2023, and had 1500 attendees, according to the organizer, Foxglove, a company that helps physical AI model builders manage and visualize their data.
- Fact 3: Harry Mellsop, a founder of Antioch, a startup that building simulation tools for model builders, suggests physical AI is in its “GPT 2 era,” the OpenAI model that pre-dated the arrival of ChatGPT.
- Fact 4: Théophile Gervet, the CEO of Genesis AI, a vertically-integrated humanoid robotics company that raised a $105 million seed round this year, disagreed, telling TechCrunch “we’re too early in this wave for a brain strategy to work; our take us there’s lots of opportunities to co-design hardware and AI.” Gervet also touched on another hot topic in the sector: How specifically to focus your physical AI business.
Physical AI is one of the hottest sectors in venture investing, with companies raising billions to apply the tools that gave us Large Language Models to robotics. That excitement helped deliver a big IPO for Unitree, China’s leading robot maker, which saw the company valued at $66 billion after its arrival on China’s equivalent of the NASDAQ.
This week, however, the bottom fell out, and the company lost nearly half of its value. Analysts point to one obvious issue: While the robots’ physical capabilities are improving, they still lack the know-how to actually do value-creating work. At last week’s Actuate conference, a gathering of developers building AI brains for robots, the excitement was clear.
(Original synthesis pending human/AI review — generated by the stub provider by selecting real sentences from the source material, not by writing new analysis or commentary.)
Original source: TechCrunch
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