Humanity has benefited greatly from mechanizing and automating previously manual tasks. There was a time when fields were hoed by hand. Then we invented the plow and later the tractor. Today with precision farm equipment we can have no-till planting, which retains and even builds topsoil, at scale. And yet, there are still some back breaking and highly repetitive tasks in agriculture. The same is true in industry. Despite massive progress, there is still manual final assembly of many products. Some fields, such as construction, have seen even less progress.
The great promise of robotics is to further free up humanity to pursue distinctly human activities, including caring for others, creating and enjoying art, exploring nature, engaging in our communities and so much more. At USV we have for some time believed that robotics is entering a new era of capabilities, resulting in investments such as VIAM and Tutor.
Today we are excited to announce our investment in Generalist. Foundational robotics models have entered the era of scaling laws, much as happened with LLMs a few years back. With way more capabilities established in pre-training, task-specific training is becoming much faster and requiring significantly less data. That alone, however, is not enough. The key metric for commercial viability is reliability at speed.
We have been impressed by the dramatic progress the team at Generalist has achieved with the release of their GEN-1 model. GEN-1 has improved success rates to 99% at a 3x increase in speed for tasks on which previous models achieved 64%. This is sufficient to power deployments and the company is working closely with select early adopters.
Following this round, Generalist is growing the team, hiring in both Boston and the SF Bay Area.