Before I could get absorbed in the spectacle of an AI navigating the game’s virtual environment, I heard the electronic footsteps of a large quadrupedal robot approaching.

“The same brain powering the agent playing the game is powering the robot,” de Witte told me.

Josh Duplantis, a data analyst carrying a laptop streaming a live feed from the robot’s single camera, piped up to explain that the bot’s default mode was “exploration.”

Relying on that camera, its singular eye, the giant buglike bot walked up to me, circled around me, and continued into the office. It occasionally clipped the legs of chairs or bumped into an errant trash bin, much like a toddler who hasn’t yet learned how her body relates to the world around it. Duplantis said it took just eight minutes of real-world robotics data to fine-tune an AI model for the quadruped. What’s more, that data was collected on the street, not inside the office where the bot was currently navigating itself.