Physical Intelligence, Stripe veteran Lachy Groom's latest bet, is building Silicon Valley's buzziest robot brains

Inside, the space is a giant concrete box made slightly less austere by a haphazard sprawl of long blonde-wood tables. Some are clearly meant for lunch, dotted with Girl Scout cookie boxes, jars of Vegemite (someone here is Australian), and small wire baskets stuffed with one too many condiments. The rest of the tables tell a different story entirely. Many more of them are laden with monitors, spare robotics parts, tangles of black wire, and fully assembled robotic arms in various states of attempting to master the mundane. Quan Vuong, another cofounder who came from Google DeepMind, explains that the strategy revolves around cross-embodiment learning and diverse data sources. If someone builds a new hardware platform tomorrow, they won’t need to start data collection from scratch – they can transfer all the knowledge the model already has. “The marginal cost of onboarding autonomy to a new robot platform, whatever that platform might be, it’s just a lot lower,” he says. During my visit, one arm is folding a pair of black pants, or trying to. It’s not going well. Another is attempting to turn a shirt inside out with the kind of determination that suggests it will eventually succeed, just not today. A third – this one seems to have found its calling – is quickly peeling a zucchini, after which it is supposed to deposit the shavings into a separate container. The shavings are going well, at least.