
For two decades, Abhinav Gupta has argued that intelligence comes from contact with the world. His route from computer vision lab to factory floor is a story of fewer labels, more experiments, and robots finally learning on the job.
Deepak Pathak is the co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, the Pittsburgh robotics company building a single general-purpose 'brain' that can run any robot from a quadruped to a humanoid. A Raj Reddy Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon, he earned a gold medal at IIT Kanpur and a PhD at UC Berkeley before betting that physical intelligence, not language, is the real path to AGI. In January 2026 Skild raised $1.4 billion at a valuation north of $14 billion, backed by SoftBank, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos.