Skild AI announces $300M funding from Jeff Bezos, Softbank to build ‘robot brains’

Artificial intelligence firm Skild AI recently emerged from stealth to report the successful closing of a $300 million series A funding round featuring participation by Jeff Bezos and Softbank among others.

Skild AI is a Carnegie Mellon spinout focused on building an AI system capable of being retrofitted to various machines and robotics devices called a “general-purpose brain.”

According to a company blog post, the funding was raised at a valuation of $1.5 billion and was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions). It also featured participation from Felicis Ventures, Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, CRV, Amazon, SV Angel, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Artificial intelligence brains

Skild AI represents the latest unicorn to enter the AI space with the lofty goal of developing an “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), it joins OpenAI, Anthropic AI, xAI, and countless other organizations working to develop human-level AI.

However, it’s important to note that AGI is a nebulous term with no scientific meaning. There is no consensus among scientists or engineers as to what, exactly, would spell the difference between a powerful AI system and an actual AGI system.

As of now, AGI remains theoretical. To the best of our knowledge, the scientific method has so far produced no evidence that AGI is a fundamental possibility.

Aside from breaking the AGI barrier, Skild AI appears to be trying to get in on the ground floor robot operating systems.

According to the blog post, Skild AI’s long-term goal is to develop a modular artificial “brain” that can be retrofitted for use in, ostensibly, any housing that meets its power and connectivity requirements. Details are still scarce as to how this product/service will be developed.

The Jeff Bezos connection

The series A funding announcement didn’t mention any specifics concerning the company’s roadmaps or partnerships. However, we can speculate that Jeff Bezos or Amazon might be lining up work with the company based on their collective participation in the funding round.

It’s also likely that other companies specializing in robotics, such as Boston Dynamics, who aren’t necessarily in the business of creating human-level AI systems to power them, could serve as synergistic business mates.

In the realm of pure speculation, we can assume that the development of an AI brain will involve massive infrastructure similar to those necessary for the development of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok. This would put chipmakers such as Nvidia and AMD at the top of the company’s list, however there’s also the Jeff Bezos and Amazon connection.

Amazon owns a massive GPU cluster, which was used to train its Bedrock AI system and, arguably, Amazon Web Services is the world's most popular cloud services platform.

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