Physical Intelligence opens a beta of its Pi API, letting outside teams fine tune and run its robot foundation models on their own robots
Announcing the beta release of the Pi API. We’ve partnered with companies across diverse industries to adapt our models to their robots and applications, from harvesting strawberries to assembling servers. Now we’re opening access to more teams.
Context
Offering robot brains as a hosted service could let many more companies automate physical tasks without building their own models, much as language model APIs did for software.
Physical Intelligence is a San Francisco robotics AI company known for its pi series of models, and this is its own announcement with a blog post. Access is through a waitlist where applicants describe what they want to build. Pricing, endpoints and supported data formats were not disclosed, according to KiaDev and Unite.AI.
Deep dive
On October 13, Physical Intelligence posted: Announcing the beta release of the Pi API. It wrote that it has partnered with companies across diverse industries to adapt its models to their robots and applications, from harvesting strawberries to assembling servers, and is now opening access to more teams.
The company's blog says it is making its latest models available for training and inference through the API. Users upload data, launch fine tuning on compute and infrastructure Physical Intelligence manages, and then access the fine tuned models through a hosted gateway to run inference on their robots.
The blog says the latest model available through the API already provides more data efficient fine tuning and improved capability for its partners. Because Physical Intelligence can update the underlying models quickly, it says it plans to keep giving API users its latest and most capable models. It called the beta its first step toward providing a physical intelligence foundation the community can build on and enabling end to end autonomy.
KiaDev noted that the announcement gives no timeline for broader availability and leaves out operational details such as pricing and limits. Running inference in the cloud also means robots depend on a network connection to a hosted model, which may not suit every setting.
What to expect next
Watch for pricing, latency figures and the first public customers of the Pi API, which will show whether hosted robot models are practical for real deployments.
Also watch whether competitors in robot foundation models, including Nvidia, Google DeepMind and newer labs like Nature Will in story 13, offer similar hosted services for outside developers. Safety rules for cloud controlled robots may follow.