Physical Intelligence opens a beta of its Pi API for fine-tuning robot models

Physical Intelligence builds robotic foundation models, general-purpose models such as π0 and π0.5 that need less data to adapt to new tasks, places or robots. With the Pi API, customers upload robot data, start fine-tuning on computers Physical Intelligence manages and call the fine-tuned model through a hosted gateway.

The API serves the company’s latest model, which it says fine-tunes with less data and is more capable, though it hasn’t named it. Physical Intelligence plans to keep putting its newest models behind the API.

Physical Intelligence works with companies that deploy robots, such as Actor, whose autonomous wheel loader fills dump trucks in Utah with no one in the cab. A small number of companies also had early access to the API, to test whether they could improve their robots on their own. Almond iterated with it for four days to get a model that lets its Axol robot deburr spacers used in building Axol itself. Most of these deployments used cloud-hosted inference, and some ran into network connectivity problems.

Physical Intelligence is starting small and onboarding teams in batches from a waitlist. It hasn’t published prices or a date for wider access.