Other well-funded companies operate at the intersection of AI and robotics — such as Physical Intelligence and Skild AI. Zhou also acknowledged that “there’s probably 50 or 100 robotic hand companies out there.” But he and his co-founder Théophile Gervet hope that building their own will give them the upper hand.

The key difference is that Genesis’ hand has the same size and shape as a human hand — rather than the two-finger grippers many robotics companies have been using — reducing the gap with real-world conditions.

“That lets us collect a lot more data than was previously possible, to train a model that can do many more tasks,” said Gervet, a former research scientist at Mistral AI who is now Genesis’ president.

Of all the physical manipulation tasks showcased in the video below, Gervet’s personal favorite is cooking, because it proves that the robot has been able to complete a long series of difficult tasks, such as cracking an egg and slicing a tomato. But Genesis has also tasked its robots with preparing smoothies, playing the piano, and solving Rubik’s cube — a robotics gimmick.