The evolution of AI technology traces a path that we humans do

It parallels the story of human intelligence as we grow from infancy to adulthood and venture out

- JASPREET BINDRA

Most of us were introduced to artificial intelligence (AI) through robots. The terrifying Terminators, Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics and the friendly robots of Japanese movies were the first intelligent machines we encountered. But when AI finally came, it was through machine learning algorithms behind online recommendation engines, the protein-folding miracles of DeepMind and the near-human chatbot of ChatGPT. It is interesting how robots are coming back. Nvidia recently announced an investment in robotic startup Field, valued at $2 billion and revenue-positive. Another one, Skid, has raised money from SoftBank at a valuation of $4 billion, while Physical Intelligence raised half of that and released its first model Pi-Zero. AI seems to be going back to robots. Nvidia founder Jensen Huang has neatly captured the way AI has moved: from Perception AI to Generative AI to Agentic AI, and, finally, to Physical AI (bit.ly/3EPXA4f). Curiously, this is how humans grow too, taking the human-AI similarity to a new level.