Physical Intelligence
Physical Intelligence and the pi0 Model
Physical Intelligence
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Overview
Physical Intelligence (π) is a robotics AI startup founded in 2024, developing general-purpose robot foundation models. Founded by a team from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Stanford, the company raised the largest seed funding round in robotics history.
| Item | Details |
|---|
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA |
| Founded | March 2024 |
| CEO | Karol Hausman (formerly Google DeepMind) |
| Funding | $400M+ (Seed: $70M, Series A: $400M) |
| Valuation | $2.4B (as of November 2024) |
Founding Team
Co-Founders
| Name | Previous Role | Position |
|---|
| Karol Hausman | Google DeepMind (RT-2) | CEO |
| Sergey Levine | UC Berkeley (RL Expert) | Chief Scientist |
| Chelsea Finn | Stanford (MAML, Meta-learning) | Research |
| Brian Ichter | Google DeepMind (RT-2) | Research |
Key Investors
- Thrive Capital, Lux Capital
- Khosla Ventures, OpenAI
- Jeff Bezos, Sequoia
pi0 Model
Key Features
| Item | Details |
|---|
| Parameters | 3.3B |
| Architecture | PaliGemma + Flow Matching |
| Core Technology | Action Expert with Flow Matching |
| Open Source | Released in 2025 |
Flow Matching Approach
Uses Flow Matching instead of Diffusion:
[Noise] ──Flow Matching──→ [Action Chunk]
(faster inference)
- Faster inference than Diffusion
- Well-suited for continuous action space
- Capable of learning multi-modal action distributions
- Trained on 51 tasks across 20 robot configurations
- Zero-shot generalization capability
- Superior performance compared to single-robot policies
Data Collection
- Single-arm robots
- Bimanual arms
- Humanoid upper body
- Mobile manipulators
Data Characteristics
- Cross-embodiment data
- Diverse environments (homes, warehouses, offices)
- Includes dexterous manipulation
Approach
”Bring GPT to Robotics”
LLM Success = Large-scale Data + Transformer + Scaling
Physical Intelligence Goal = Apply same approach to robotics
Three Core Principles
- Scaling: More data, larger models
- Generality: Not limited to specific robots/tasks
- Foundation Model: Fast adaptation through fine-tuning
Roadmap
| Timeline | Milestone |
|---|
| 2024.03 | Company founded |
| 2024.10 | pi0 release |
| 2024.11 | $400M Series A |
| 2025 | pi0 open source release |
| 2025+ | Commercial deployment |
References
See Also