AI robotics has a big data problem. This startup raised $405 million to fix it in surprising ways.

"It's funny, but also true. AI models are getting really good at digital skills such as coding. Beyond bits, though - in the physical world - AI is nowhere near matching the ability of humans to perform many different tasks. A big reason for this yawning capability gap is data. In the digital world, the internet provides a readymade mountain of information that machines can learn from. In the world of atoms, there's no equivalent."

"This physical-world data mountain must be built from scratch. It's a herculean task. I recently met an unassuming startup founder who's hacking away at this problem in an interesting way. Data without physical assets Ali Agha spent seven years at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, developing autonomous multi- robot systems for exploring different environments, including Mars. He started FieldAI in early 2023 and has a team of robotics and AI experts from companies including Google, DeepMind, Waymo, Tesla, Nvidia, Boston Dynamics,"

AI models increasingly excel at digital skills like coding, while physical-world capabilities remain far behind human versatility. The primary obstacle is the lack of large, ready-made datasets for physical tasks; such data must be created from scratch, which is a herculean engineering challenge. Ali Agha founded FieldAI after seven years at NASA JPL, assembling robotics and AI talent from major companies. Large tech firms with factories and warehouses have an advantage because of physical assets, so FieldAI focuses on practical deployment of diverse robots to perform simple, valuable tasks, continuously collecting real-world data to iteratively improve models and expand capabilities.

Read at Business Insider