Physical AI

AI beating humans at games is old news. Deep Blue took Kasparov in ‘97. AlphaGo stunned the world in 2016. But every one of those victories happened in digital environments with perfect information and unlimited thinking time. Table tennis is a completely different beast. And this week, Sony AI’s robot Ace became the first autonomous machine to defeat elite human players under official competition rules — earning the cover of Nature in the process. ...

Here’s the question that’s haunted robotics for decades: why can a toddler grab a toy they’ve never seen, but a million-dollar robot arm locks up the moment something shifts two inches? Rhoda AI just bet $450 million it has the answer. The Palo Alto startup emerged from 18 months of stealth on Tuesday with a Series A that values the company at $1.7 billion. Their play: a robot intelligence platform called FutureVision that learns how the physical world works by watching hundreds of millions of internet videos, then uses that understanding to predict and react in real time. ...