A senior research scientist at DeepMind who worked on robotics and AI has left Google to create his own robotics startup, called Generalist AI, and has already obtained investment from Nvidia, TechCrunch has learned.
Pete Florence was listed as co-founder and CEO of Generalist AI at a panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose yesterday. The panel was for portfolio companies of Nvidia’s VC arm, NVentures.
NVentures has become an especially active venture capital firm since Nvidia has enjoyed skyrocketing financial success in this new age of AI.
“We are largely still in stealth,” Florence told TechCrunch, explaining that the mission of the startup is “to make general-purpose robots a reality.”
Florence left DeepMind a year ago, per his LinkedIn profile. DeepMind student researcher Kamyar Ghasemipour has also joined Generalist AI as a founding technical staff member, according to Ghasemipour’s LinkedIn.
Florence joins a string of other DeepMind alums who have founded their own companies like autonomous coding startup Reflection AI, biotech startup Latent Labs, Mistral, and others.
Outside of DeepMind but still within Alphabet, key leaders behind Google’s viral NotebookLM product left to found their own AI startup late last year.
DeepMind has its own robotics division, which unveiled new AI models for controlling robots this month. Work co-authored by Florence is cited four times in the paper announcing the models.
Florence said he couldn’t specify exactly what his startup was up to during the GTC panel, but it’s clear it will focus on robotics.
“We are dead set on making robots that can do absolutely anything,” Florence said in response to a question about what the world would look like if his startup was wildly successful.
“So just imagine a world where the marginal cost of physical labor is driven to zero.”
Nvidia declined to comment. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.
