Burst! The AI company is only a year old and is valued at 10.8 billion

Burst! The AI company is only a year old and is valued at 10.8 billion

Burst! The AI company is only a year old and is valued at 10.8 billion

Last week, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based AI company Skild AI raised $300 million in Series A funding, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.

The round was led by top hedge fund Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SoftBank Group and Bezos Expeditions, which manages Jeff Bezos' personal assets. Sequoia Capital, Amazon, Felicis Ventures, Menlo Ventures and other well-known institutions joined the investment.

Founded in 2023, Skild AI was spun out of Carnegie Mellon University to build an AI system that can be installed on a variety of machines and robotic devices, known as the "universal brain", that is, to develop the lowest level of operating system for machines or robots.

Skild AI says the general brain functions it trains, including manipulation, movement, navigation, will be applicable to a variety of robots, such as flexible four-legged robots, and vision-based humanoid robots that dexterously manipulate objects in complex household and industrial tasks. The ultimate goal is to make robots available to all industries at low cost.

The biggest limitation of existing robot products in application is that most of them need to be programmed and pre-trained, and can only complete specific tasks in specific scenarios. Skild AI hopes that with the addition of a universal brain, robots can gradually emerge from the pre-training of the digital world, learn from the dynamic real world, digest information, interact with people, and complete multiple tasks.

For example, if Skild AI were to build the brain, in collaboration with Boston Dynamics' Body, it would be possible to create supermonsters with both brains and bodies.

It is not surprising that Skild AI was born in Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Mellon University has the world's top computer profession, especially attaches great importance to the combination of industry, has strong research and application capabilities, and has excellent performance in AI, language recognition, computer vision, machine learning and other fields. In 1988, Kai-fu Lee received his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, where his thesis focused on machine recognition of human speech.

Skild AI's two co-founders, President Abhinav Gupta (above right) and CEO Deepak Pathak, are both from India and former professors at Carnegie Mellon University, with a combined 25 years of experience in robotics and AI. They have outstanding achievements in many fields such as self-supervised robotics, curiosity-driven and adaptive robot learning.

Pathak earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and his research areas include computer vision, machine learning, and robotics. Gupta's research focuses on computer vision.

Pathak says Skild AI represents a step forward in the development of robotics at scale and has the potential to transform the entire real economy.

Commenting on the investment in Skild AI, Stephanie Zhan, Partner at Sequoia Capital, said: "The robotics world is about to usher in a GPT-3 moment that will trigger a monumental transformation that will bring the advances seen in the field of digital intelligence to the physical world.

Skild AI chose to take Bezos and Amazon's money, the reason is also very simple, see Amazon's background. Training the AI brain requires a powerful infrastructure (GPU cluster), just like OpenAI relies on Microsoft's cloud to train the GPT series of large models. Amazon has a huge fleet of Gpus, equipped with a large number of the most advanced Nvidia Gpus, and its cloud service is also the best in the world. Amazon has no "son" on the generative AI track for the time being, and once it makes results, it will get strong support. From Amazon's point of view, it also hopes to have a super AI product of its own "dry son", just as Microsoft has OpenAI, invested Skild AI and the previous $4 billion invested Anthropic have this consideration.

Gupta's doctoral supervisor at the University of Maryland is Larry S. Davis, a computer bull who serves as a senior chief scientist at Amazon, and it is not known whether Skild AI took Amazon's money or not.

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