March 20, 2012 - The news that had been DeepMind Pete Florence, a senior scientist working on robotics and artificial intelligence, has left Google and founded his own roboticsStartups --Generalist AI. According to TechCrunch, the company has secured aNvidiaofinvest.
At NVIDIA's GTC conference in San Jose, CA on March 19th, Pete Florence, as co-founder and CEO of Generalist AI, appeared on a panel of portfolio companies under NVentures, NVIDIA's venture capital arm. NVentures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIA, has been particularly active in recent years as NVIDIA has enjoyed tremendous financial success in the new era of artificial intelligence.
Florence said in an interview that the company is still in a "secretive phase" and that its mission is "to make universal robotics a reality. Florence left DeepMind a year ago, according to her profile, and Kamyar Ghasemipour, a student researcher at DeepMind, has joined Generalist AI as a founding member of the technical team.
1AI notes that, with the exception of Florence.Several former DeepMind employees have also started their own companies., such as autonomous programming startup Reflection AI, biotech startup Latent Labs, Mistral, and others. Also, although not from DeepMind, the main head of Google's popular NotebookLM product left the company late last year to start his own AI startup.
It's worth noting that DeepMind itself has a robotics division and this month introduced new AI models for robot control. In the paper announcing these models, the research Florence co-authored was cited four times.
Although Florence did not reveal exactly what projects his startup is working on at the GTC conference, what is clear is that the company will focus on robotics. When asked what the world would look like if his startup became a huge success, Florence said, "Our goal is to build robots that can do anything., imagine the marginal cost of physical labor being reduced to zero."