Robotics startup Generalist reaches $3B valuation, sources say

Generalist, a robotics startup founded by former researchers from Google DeepMind and Boston Dynamics, has reached a $3 billion valuation after raising nearly $200 million in new funding led by 8VC. The company is developing an AI foundation model designed to work with various robots and claims its latest model can enable robots to learn new tasks from video demonstrations lasting only 3 to 12 seconds. The funding reflects investor optimism that robotics may soon experience a breakthrough moment similar to ChatGPT, where robots could perform general tasks without being explicitly trained for each one. However, some investors caution that a truly general robotics model may still be years away because robots cannot be trained on internet data the way language models can.