Karol Hausman co-founded Physical Intelligence in 2024 alongside a team of researchers drawn from Google DeepMind, Google Research, and academic robotics labs at Stanford and Berkeley. As CEO, Hausman has focused the company's research on building general-purpose robot foundation models that work across different robot hardware, rather than models custom-built for a single machine.
Hausman's research background in robotic learning informs the company's core technical bet: that a shared, transferable model of physical action - similar to how large language models generalize across text tasks - can eventually let a wide range of robot hardware learn new physical tasks without task-specific retraining from scratch.