00:00Today on Forbes, this $1.5 billion AI company is building a general-purpose brain for robots.
00:09Robots, whether they're bipedal humanoids handling basic factory tasks
00:14or four-legged military robot dogs intended for urban combat, need brains.
00:20Historically, these have been highly specialized and purpose-built.
00:24But a Pittsburgh-based robotics startup claims it's created a single,
00:28off-the-shelf intelligence that can be plugged into different robots to enable basic functions.
00:34Skilled AI, founded in May 2023 by Abhinav Gupta and Deepak Pathak,
00:40two former Carnegie Mellon University professors,
00:43has created a foundational model for what it describes as a
00:46quote, general-purpose brain that can be slotted into a variety of robots,
00:51enabling them to do things like climbing steep slopes,
00:54walking over objects obstructing its path,
00:57and identifying and picking up items.
01:00The company announced on Tuesday that it has raised $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation
01:06in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures, SoftBank,
01:11Co2, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,
01:14with participation from CRV, Felicis Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Amazon, and General Catalyst, among others.
01:22Raviraj Jain, the Lightspeed partner who also led the company's seed round in July 2023,
01:28told Forbes he was wildly impressed with Skilled AI's models
01:32when he first saw them being pressure tested last April.
01:35Robots using them were able to perform tasks in environments that they'd never seen before
01:39and hadn't been designed for demos.
01:42He said, quote,
01:43The robots at that time were able to climb stairs,
01:46and I think it's really crazy how well they were able to do it
01:49because it's a very complex stability problem.
01:53And still more impressive,
01:54the robots using Skilled's AI models also demonstrated, quote,
01:58emergent capabilities, entirely new abilities they weren't taught.
02:03These are often simple, like recovering an object that slips out of hand or rotating an object.
02:08But they demonstrate the model's ability to perform unanticipated tasks,
02:12a tendency that occurs in advanced artificial systems like large language models.
02:17Skilled has pulled this off by training its model on a massive database of text, images, and video,
02:23one it claims is 1,000 times larger than those used by its rivals.
02:28To create this massive database, the co-founders, both former AI researchers at Meta,
02:33blended a mix of data collection techniques,
02:36which they have developed and tested over years of research.
02:40One way was to hire human contractors to operate robots remotely
02:44and collect data about those actions.
02:46Another was to have the robot carry out random tasks, record the results, and learn by trial and error.
02:53The AI model was also trained on millions of public videos.
02:58As a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley,
03:00Pathak developed a way of instilling, quote, artificial curiosity into robots
03:05by rewarding the system for producing outcomes that come about
03:08when it can't predict the results of its actions.
03:11Pathak explained, quote,
03:13The more uncertain the agent is about the prediction of the effect of its actions,
03:17the more curious it gets to explore.
03:20The technique incentivized the AI to navigate more scenarios and collect more data.
03:26Pathak's research on curiosity-driven learning was published in 2017
03:31and has been cited more than 4,000 times, he said.
03:34Pathak also devised a way for robots to use written information from large language models like GPT
03:40of how to open a can of milk, for example,
03:42and convert that into actions.
03:45Pathak said, quote,
04:00Skilled AI faces steep competition from a string of robotics companies
04:04that have emerged with billions of dollars in venture funding thanks to the AI boom.
04:09Industry behemoth OpenAI recently revived its robotics team
04:13to supply models to robotics companies, as Forbes first reported.
04:17Then there's outfits like humanoid robotics company Figure AI,
04:21helmed by billionaire CEO Brett Adcock,
04:24and Covariant, an OpenAI spinoff that is building chat GPT for robots
04:29and has raised over $200 million to do it.
04:33For full coverage, check out Rashi Srivastava's piece on Forbes.com.
04:38This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
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