From the road, the one indication I’ve discovered Bodily Intelligence’s headquarters in San Francisco is a pi image that’s a barely totally different coloration than the remainder of the door. After I stroll in, I’m instantly confronted with exercise. There’s no reception desk, no gleaming brand in fluorescent lights.
Inside, the area is a big concrete field made barely much less austere by a haphazard sprawl of lengthy blonde-wood tables. Some are clearly meant for lunch, dotted with Woman Scout cookie bins, jars of Vegemite (somebody right here is Australian), and small wire baskets filled with one too many condiments. The remainder of the tables inform a special story completely. Many extra of them are laden with displays, spare robotics components, tangles of black wire, and totally assembled robotic arms in numerous states of making an attempt to grasp the mundane.
Throughout my go to, one arm is folding a pair of black pants, or making an attempt to. It’s not going nicely. One other is making an attempt to show a shirt inside out with the sort of dedication that implies it’ll ultimately succeed, simply not right this moment. A 3rd — this one appears to have discovered its calling — is rapidly peeling a zucchini, after which it’s purported to deposit the shavings right into a separate container. The shavings are going nicely, at the least.
“Consider it like ChatGPT, however for robots,” Sergey Levine tells me, gesturing towards the motorized ballet unfolding throughout the room. Levine, an affiliate professor at UC Berkeley and one in every of Bodily Intelligence’s co-founders, has the amiable, bespectacled demeanor of somebody who has spent appreciable time explaining complicated ideas to individuals who don’t instantly grasp them.
What I’m watching, he explains, is the testing section of a steady loop: knowledge will get collected on robotic stations right here and at different places — warehouses, houses, wherever the workforce can arrange store — and that knowledge trains general-purpose robotic basis fashions. When researchers practice a brand new mannequin, it comes again to stations like these for analysis. The pants-folder is somebody’s experiment. So is the shirt-turner. The zucchini-peeler is perhaps testing whether or not the mannequin can generalize throughout totally different greens, studying the basic motions of peeling nicely sufficient to deal with an apple or a potato it’s by no means encountered.
The firm additionally operates a check kitchen on this constructing and elsewhere utilizing off-the-shelf {hardware} to show the robots to totally different environments and challenges. There’s a complicated espresso machine close by, and I assume it’s for the workers till Levine clarifies that no, it’s there for the robots to study. Any foamed lattes are knowledge, not a perk for the handfuls of engineers on the scene who’re principally peering into their computer systems or hovering over their mechanized experiments.
The {hardware} itself is intentionally unglamorous. These arms promote for about $3,500, and that’s with what Levine describes as “an infinite markup” from the seller. In the event that they manufactured them in-house, the fabric price would drop beneath $1,000. A couple of years in the past, he says, a roboticist would have been shocked these items may do something in any respect. However that’s the purpose — good intelligence compensates for dangerous {hardware}.
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June 23, 2026
As Levine excuses himself, I’m approached by Lachy Groom, shifting by the area with the purposefulness of somebody who has half a dozen issues taking place directly. At 31, Groom nonetheless has the fresh-faced high quality of Silicon Valley’s boy surprise, a designation he earned early, having bought his first firm 9 months after beginning it at age 13 in his native Australia (this explains the Vegemite).
After I first approached him earlier, as he welcomed a small gaggle of sweatshirt-wearing guests into the constructing, his response to my request for time with him was rapid: “Completely not, I’ve bought conferences.” Now he has 10 minutes, perhaps.
Groom discovered what he was searching for when he began following the educational work popping out of the labs of Levine and Chelsea Finn, a former Berkeley PhD scholar of Levine’s who now runs her personal lab at Stanford targeted on robotic studying. Their names stored showing in the whole lot attention-grabbing taking place in robotics. When he heard rumors they is perhaps beginning one thing, he tracked down Karol Hausman, a Google DeepMind researcher who additionally taught at Stanford and who Groom had discovered was concerned. “It was simply a kind of conferences the place you stroll out and it’s like, That is it.”
Groom by no means supposed to turn into a full-time investor, he tells me, regardless that some may surprise why not given his observe report. After leaving Stripe, the place he was an early worker, he spent roughly 5 years as an angel investor, making early bets on corporations like Figma, Notion, Ramp, and Lattice whereas looking for the best firm to start out or be a part of himself. His first robotics funding, Commonplace Bots, got here in 2021 and reintroduced him to a area he’d beloved as a child constructing Lego Mindstorms. As he jokes, he was “on trip way more as an investor.” However investing was only a method to keep energetic and meet individuals, not the endgame. “I used to be searching for 5 years for the corporate to go begin post-Stripe,” he says. “Good concepts at a superb time with a superb workforce — [that’s] extraordinarily uncommon. It’s all execution, however you may execute like hell on a nasty thought, and it’s nonetheless a nasty thought.”
The 2-year-old firm has now raised over $1 billion, and once I ask about its runway, he’s fast to make clear it doesn’t truly burn that a lot. Most of its spending goes towards compute. A second later, he acknowledges that underneath the best phrases, with the best companions, he’d increase extra. “There’s no restrict to how a lot cash we will actually put to work,” he says. “There’s at all times extra compute you may throw on the downside.”
What makes this association notably uncommon is what Groom doesn’t give his backers: a timeline for turning Bodily Intelligence right into a money-making endeavor. “I don’t give traders solutions on commercialization,” he says of backers that embrace Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital amongst others which have valued the corporate at $5.6 billion. “That’s kind of a bizarre factor, that individuals tolerate that.” However tolerate it they do, they usually might not at all times, which is why it behooves the corporate to be well-capitalized now.
So what’s the technique, if not commercialization? Quan Vuong, one other co-founder who got here from Google DeepMind, explains that it revolves round cross-embodiment studying and numerous knowledge sources. If somebody builds a brand new {hardware} platform tomorrow, they received’t want to start out knowledge assortment from scratch — they will switch all of the data the mannequin already has. “The marginal price of onboarding autonomy to a brand new robotic platform, no matter that platform is perhaps, it’s only a lot decrease,” he says.
The corporate is already working with a small variety of corporations in numerous verticals — logistics, grocery, a chocolate maker throughout the road — to check whether or not their techniques are adequate for real-world automation. Vuong claims that in some circumstances, they already are. With their “any platform, any job” strategy, the floor space for achievement is giant sufficient to start out checking off duties which might be prepared for automation right this moment.
Bodily Intelligence isn’t alone in chasing this imaginative and prescient. The race to construct general-purpose robotic intelligence — the inspiration on which extra specialised purposes could be constructed, very like the LLM fashions that captivated the world three years in the past — is heating up. Pittsburgh-based Skild AI, based in 2023, simply this month raised $1.4 billion at a $14 billion valuation and is taking a notably totally different strategy. Whereas Bodily Intelligence stays targeted on pure analysis, Skild AI has already deployed its “omni-bodied” Skild Mind commercially, saying it generated $30 million in income in only a few months final 12 months throughout safety, warehouses, and manufacturing.
Skild has even taken public photographs at rivals, arguing on its weblog that the majority “robotics basis fashions” are simply vision-language fashions “in disguise” that lack “true bodily frequent sense” as a result of they rely too closely on internet-scale pretraining fairly than physics-based simulation and actual robotics knowledge.
It’s a reasonably sharp philosophical divide. Skild AI is betting that business deployment creates an information flywheel that improves the mannequin with every real-world use case. Bodily Intelligence is betting that resisting the pull of near-term commercialization will allow it to provide superior basic intelligence. Who’s “extra proper” will take years to resolve.
Within the meantime, Bodily Intelligence operates with what Groom describes as uncommon readability. “It’s such a pure firm. A researcher has a necessity, we go and acquire knowledge to help that want — or new {hardware} or no matter it’s — after which we do it. It’s not externally pushed.” The corporate had a 5- to 10-year roadmap of what the workforce thought could be attainable. By month 18, they’d blown by it, he says.
The corporate has about 80 workers and plans to develop, although Groom says hopefully “as slowly as attainable.” What’s essentially the most difficult, he says, is {hardware}. “{Hardware} is simply actually laborious. Every thing we do is a lot tougher than a software program firm.” {Hardware} breaks. It arrives slowly, delaying assessments. Security issues complicate the whole lot.
As Groom springs as much as rush to his subsequent dedication, I’m left watching the robots proceed their observe. The pants are nonetheless not fairly folded. The shirt stays stubbornly right-side-out. The zucchini shavings are piling up properly.
There are apparent questions, together with my very own, about whether or not anybody truly needs a robotic of their kitchen peeling greens, about security, about canines going loopy at mechanical intruders of their houses, about whether or not all the money and time being invested right here solves sufficiently big issues or creates new ones. In the meantime, outsiders query the corporate’s progress, whether or not its imaginative and prescient is achievable, and if betting on basic intelligence fairly than particular purposes is sensible.
If Groom has any doubts, he doesn’t present it. He’s working with individuals who’ve been engaged on this downside for many years and who imagine the timing is lastly proper, which is all he must know.
Apart from, Silicon Valley has been backing individuals like Groom and giving them numerous rope for the reason that starting of the trade, realizing there’s a superb likelihood that even with no clear path to commercialization, even with no timeline, even with out certainty about what the market will appear to be once they get there, they’ll determine it out. It doesn’t at all times work out. However when it does, it tends to justify numerous the occasions it didn’t.
