Skild AI has raised $300 million to continue building its plug-and-play robotic intelligence with the hope of enabling companies to integrate it into robots of all kinds.Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta , former Carnegie Mellon University professors, founded Skild AI in 2023 to build a"general purpose brain" for AIRobots, whether they are bipedal humanoids handling basic factory tasks or four-legged military “robot dogs” intended for urban combat, need brains.
More impressive, still: The robots using Skild’s AI models also demonstrated “emergent capabilities”— entirely new abilities they weren’t taught. These are often simple, like recovering an object that slips out of hand or rotating an object. But they demonstrate the model’s ability to perform unanticipated tasks, a tendency that occurs in advanced artificial systems like large language models.
As a PhD student at UC Berkeley, Pathak developed a way of instilling “artificial curiosity" into robots by rewarding the system for producing outcomes that come about when it can’t predict the results of its actions. “The more uncertain the agent is about the prediction of the effect of its actions, the more curious it gets to explore,” he explained. The technique incentivized the AI to navigate more scenarios and collect more data.