A senior research scientist from DeepMind, known for his work in AI and robotics, has left Google to establish his own robotics startup, Generalist AI. The company has already secured investment from Nvidia.
Pete Florence, now co-founder and CEO of Generalist AI, was featured on a panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose. The panel included startups backed by Nvidia’s venture capital arm, NVentures, which has become increasingly active as Nvidia thrives in the AI boom.
Although still operating in stealth mode, Florence shared with TechCrunch that the startup’s mission is to make general-purpose robots a reality. His LinkedIn profile indicates he left DeepMind a year ago. Another former DeepMind researcher, Kamyar Ghasemipour, has also joined Generalist AI as a founding technical staff member.
Florence follows a growing trend of DeepMind alumni launching their own ventures, such as Reflection AI in autonomous coding and biotech startup Latent Labs. Beyond DeepMind, key figures behind Google’s NotebookLM project also departed to create their own AI company last year.
DeepMind continues its own robotics research, recently unveiling AI models for robot control. Notably, work co-authored by Florence is cited multiple times in the research paper introducing these models.
While Florence remained tight-lipped about Generalist AI’s specific projects during the GTC panel, he made its ambitions clear. “We are dead set on making robots that can do absolutely anything,” he stated, envisioning a world where the marginal cost of physical labor approaches zero.
