TechCrunch learned that Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind, who worked on Robotics and AI, has left Google to create his own robotic startup called Generalist AI, and has already gained investment from Nvidia.
Pete Florence was listed as Generalist AI co-founder and CEO at a panel at NVIDIA’s GTC conference in San Jose yesterday. The panel was aimed at Nvidia’s VC ARM and Nventures portfolio companies.
Since Nvidia enjoyed surgent economic success in this new era of AI, Nventures has become a particularly active venture capital firm.
“We’re mostly stealth,” Florence told TechCrunch, explaining that the startup’s mission is to “make general purpose robots a reality.”
Florence left Deepmind a year ago, following his LinkedIn profile. According to Ghasemipour’s LinkedIn, Deepmind student researcher Kamyar Ghasemipour has joined Generalist AI as a founding technical staff.
Florence joins other Deepmind alumni who have founded their own companies, including Autonomous Coding Startup Reflection AI, Biotechnology Startup Latent Lab, and Mistral.
Outside of DeepMind, still within Alphabet, the major leader behind Google’s virus Notebooklm products found its own AI startup late last year.
DeepMind has its own robot division, and this month we have unveiled a new AI model to control robots. The work co-authored by Florence has been cited four times in a paper publishing the model.
Florence said he can’t specify exactly what his startup is doing during the GTC panel, but it’s clear that he’ll focus on robotics.
“We’re set to create robots that can do absolutely anything,” Florence said in response to a question about what the world would look like if his startup were to be a huge success.
“So imagine a world where the marginal costs of physical labor are driven to zero.”
Nvidia declined to comment. Google did not respond to requests for comment.
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