The robot, a pair of disembodied arms with crablike pincers at the end, wasn’t supposed to pick up the bag. It had been told to do a single tedious job: open plastic bags on a conveyor belt and stuff toy potted plant plushies inside them.

Then one plushie snagged halfway in. The robot paused — briefly, as if assessing its work — then did something it had not been programmed to do. It raised its other arm, grabbed the other side of the bag, gave it a quick shake so the toy slid all the way down, and then placed it back on the belt.

For a human worker that’s muscle memory. For the engineers at Generalist, a Silicon Valley startup developing robot “brains”, it was a tell: the robot wasn’t just replaying a scripted task. It was improvising.

Those kinds of “emergent” behaviors are the reason Generalist’s CEO, Pete Florence, who was a lead on PaLM-E, one of Google’s foundational robotics papers, thinks robotics is nearing its ‘ChatGPT moment.’ The startup, which raised $140 million at a $440 million valuation in 2025, and which Florence founded with Google co-worker Andy Zeng and Boston Dynamics roboticist Andy Barry, has largely been under-the-radar. Now it’s releasing a new model called Gen-1, and Florence says it can help off-the-shelf robots handle a wider range of high-dexterity tasks usually performed by humans — folding laundry and “kitting,” packing multiple different types of items into a single box—while improvising in the messy, unpredictable edge cases that have historically stumped robots.

“What’s happening now with robotics parallels when people opened GPT-3 and asked it to write a completely new limerick,” he told Forbes. “The........

© Forbes