robotics-ai
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Adnan Esmail and the Problem That Followed Him Into Every Machine
A coffee that ran six hours took Adnan Esmail from Tesla to a barking airport hangar. Now the Physical Intelligence co-founder is trying to give robots something his old machines lacked: a reusable way to learn the physical world.
Ashish Kapoor
Ashish Kapoor is the co-founder and CEO of General Robotics (formerly Scaled Foundations), a Redmond, Washington startup building a unified intelligence layer for robots of every shape. After 17 years at Microsoft, where he led the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Research group, created the open-source AirSim simulator, and co-authored the widely read 'ChatGPT for Robotics' paper, Kapoor set out in 2023 to make robot intelligence portable across hardware. His thesis: general intelligence emerges from the rich composition of many robot skills, not from a single ever-larger model. He holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, flies and has built his own airplane, and treats simulation as the laboratory where machines learn to be safe before they touch the real world.