Generalist AI

Generalist AI is a San Mateo, California-based robotics AI company founded in 2024 by Pete Florence and Andy Zeng, former Google DeepMind robotics researchers, together with Andrew Barry, a former Boston Dynamics engineer. The company builds embodied foundation models — AI systems trained to understand and act in the physical world — with the stated goal of providing the intelligence layer for the millions of robots operating today and the billions expected across factories, warehouses, laboratories, restaurants, farms, and homes in the years ahead. Its team includes researchers and engineers drawn from OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, and Google DeepMind, and it maintains offices in the Bay Area and in Boston, Massachusetts.

Generalist has released a fast succession of embodied foundation models: GEN-0 in November 2025, GEN-1 in April 2026 — which the company describes as the first general-purpose AI model to master simple physical tasks, reporting a 99% success rate on tasks where earlier models achieved 64% — and GEN-1.5 in August 2026, which can learn a new physical task from as little as 12 seconds of demonstration video and supports multiple robot end effectors. The company works with select industrial customers to adapt its models for applications such as packaging, assembly, inspection, and kitting, partnering with robotics integrators to deploy the technology in real-world manufacturing settings.