Amazon-backed firm unveils shared brains for all types of robots

Skild AI, a robotics startup backed by Amazon and prominent investors including Jeff Bezos, has unveiled Skild Brain, an artificial intelligence model designed to operate across a wide range of robots—from humanoids to quadrupeds and mobile manipulators. This AI enables robots to think, navigate, and respond with human-like adaptability, allowing them to perform complex tasks such as climbing stairs, maintaining balance after being pushed or kicked, and handling objects in cluttered environments. Skild Brain is continuously improved through data collected from deployed robots, addressing the challenge of limited real-world robotics data by combining simulated scenarios, human-action videos, and live feedback. Unlike existing robotics models that rely heavily on vision-language models (VLMs) trained on vast image and text datasets but lack physical action capabilities, Skild Brain is built specifically to overcome the scarcity of robotics data and provide true physical common sense. The founders emphasize that traditional VLM-based approaches are superficial and insufficient for complex robotic tasks, whereas Skild’s shared brain approach