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Deepak Pathak

Co-Founder and CEO, Skild AI

Search every verified Deepak Pathak interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Deepak Pathak, co-founder and CEO of Skild AI and a professor at Carnegie Mellon, spoke at an event on September 20, 2026, arguing that robotics has made little progress over the past 70 years because it has been treated primarily as a hardware problem rather than a challenge of building a general-purpose "brain." He cited a 1957 robotics demo alongside modern examples, suggesting that most people cannot distinguish between them, and calculated that collecting robot data through teleoperation at one example per minute would take the entire U.S. population over a century to reach GPT-3 scale. Pathak described Skild AI's approach as developing an "omni-bodied" brain, a single model designed to work across any robot and any task, pre-trained on scalable data sources such as simulation and human video. He stated that the company's system can transfer zero-shot to different humanoids and adapt to physical changes, such as a robot losing a leg and learning to walk on two legs within three trials. He also outlined a "data flywheel" concept, where deployment data from post-training is fed back into pre-training, and argued that an omni-bodied brain is necessary because hardware rarely remains a single version across tasks and environments. Pathak noted that Skild AI's scaled efforts are about three years old, while he has worked on the problem for over a decade.

Recent appearances

  • Robotics Has Been Stuck for 70 Years — Deepak Pathak, Skild AI

    September 24, 2026 · 📺 AI Engineer

    Show a robotics demo from 1957 next to one from today, and most people can't tell which is which. Deepak Pathak, co-founder and CEO of Skild AI and a professor at Carnegie Mellon, argues robotics stalled because it was treated as a hardware problem rather than a problem of building a general brain. Collecting robot data by teleoperation at one example a minute, he calculates, would take the entire US population more than a century to reach GPT-3 scale. Skild's answer is an "omni-bodied" brain: one model for any robot and any task. It's pre-trained on scalable data like simulation and human vi…

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  • One Brain Any Body - Deepak Pathak | Skild AI | AUTONOMOUS 2026 | Full Talk

    August 05, 2026 · 📺 AUTONOMOUS: The Future of Robotics & Physical AI

    Deepak Pathak, founder of Skild AI, on why robotics has been "almost here" for 70 years AUTONOMOUS 2026 | San Francisco His argument is that the bottleneck has never been hardware, it's the absence of a general brain. Robotics has no internet to train on, and no single data source — teleoperation, simulation, human video, self-supervision — is scalable, diverse, and close enough to the robot at once. Pathak makes the case for combining all four, and shows one model running factories, deliveries, warehouses, and robots it has never seen before. SPEAKER Deepak Pathak — Co-founder & CEO, Skil…

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  • Robot Cooking Eggs -- Live Demo

    April 23, 2026 · 📺 Skild

    Skild AI CEO Deepak Pathak (‪@pathak2206‬) gives a live tour of Skild AI's robots to Prof. Alexei A. Efros from UC Berkeley. The same base model, Skild Brain, adapts from cooking eggs to assembling blackwell GPU on a server rack. More details: https://www.skild.ai/

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  • One Brain, Any Robot: Skild AI's Skild Brain Explained | NVIDIA AI Podcast Ep. 295

    April 22, 2026 · 📺 NVIDIA

    What if one AI brain could run every robot on the planet—a humanoid, a warehouse arm, and a dog-like inspection bot—all at once? That's not a thought experiment. That's what Skild AI is building right now. Deepak Pathak (CEO and Co-Founder) and Abhinav Gupta (President and Co-Founder) of Skild AI break down Skild Brain—a universal, general-purpose AI model designed to power robots of any form factor, tackling any task, from a single shared intelligence. 🔬 Topics covered: Why robotics is fundamentally a data problem—and why there's no "internet of robot data" Skild's three-layer data stra…

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  • Skild AI's CEO on building one brain for every robot

    February 25, 2026 · 📺 Alex Heath

    Skild AI CEO Deepak Pathak sat down with me at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos to discuss his robotics AI company's $1.4 billion raise at a $14 billion valuation, why teleoperation will never produce enough data to make robots intelligent, and Skild's unconventional approach of training robots on human videos and physics simulations. We also cover the competitive landscape with OpenAI, Google, and Tesla, Skild's enterprise deployments going from zero to tens of millions in revenue, and why Pathak believes robotics — not language models — is the real path to AGI.

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  • Deepak Pathak To India Today: 'We Are Building The Brain' Which Has Been Missing For Robots | Davos

    January 23, 2026 · 📺 India Today

    Deepak Pathak, CEO and co-founder of Skild AI, discusses the future of robotics and artificial intelligence at the World Economic Forum. Pathak explains that his company is focused on building the 'brain' for robots, a critical component that has been missing for decades, preventing machines from performing complex real-world tasks like opening doors. Addressing fears of job displacement, Pathak notes that while India currently has a labour surplus, many parts of the world like Japan and Korea face a shrinking workforce and desperately need automation. He highlights that Skild AI has already e…

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  • The Next Wave of Deep Tech and Future Use | AI House Davos 2026

    January 22, 2026 · 📺 AI House Davos

    As generative and agentic AI move from early adoption into true mainstream use, a new set of frontiers is rapidly coming into view. This session explores the next wave of AI innovation beyond today's paradigms, examining where the technology is heading, which breakthroughs still stand between us and the next leap forward, and how these advances could reshape entire industries throughout the 2030s. From multimodal intelligence and autonomous experimentation to large-scale simulation and the emergence of new human-machine interfaces, the panel maps out trajectories that could redefine how AI is…

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  • Davos 2026 LIVE | In Conversation With Rafal Modrzewski, ICEYE & Deepak Pathak, Skild AI | WEF Live

    January 20, 2026 · 📺 CNBC-TV18

    #DavosWithCNBCTV18| The Startup Conversation Startups On AI, Fund Raise & Growth Opportunities. Catch Rafal Modrzewski, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder ICEYE & Deepak Pathak, CEO and Co-Founder Skild AI #Davos2026 #WEF #RafalModrzewski #ICEYE #DeepakPathak #SkildAI #SpaceTech #AI #DeepTech #Innovation #Startups #IndiaAtDavos #GlobalEconomy #BusinessNews #CNBCTV18 🔴CNBC TV18 LIVE TV: https://youtube.com/live/P857H4ej-MQ SUBSCRIBE to our Channel: https://bit.ly/3nvEcxf ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------…

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  • Skild AI CEO Deepak Pathak On Building The Brain For Robots At Davos 2026

    January 20, 2026 · 📺 NDTV

    At the World Economic Forum 2026 in Davos, Deepak Pathak, Co-Founder & CEO of Skild AI, explains why the future of AI lies in robotics and why they feel that the missing piece has always been the robot brain. With fresh funding, a $14 billion valuation, backing from Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang, and a vision of “Any robot, any task, one brain”, Skild AI is redefining automation. Deepak speaks to Aayush Ailawadi about humanoid robots and omni-bodied intelligence, solving the data gap in robotics, & he even shares his insights on AGI timelines, job displacement myths, and how India could become a…

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  • The $14B startup teaching robots how to move like humans

    January 19, 2026 · 📺 Morning Brew Daily

    Neal and Ray sit down with Skild AI Founder and CEO Deepak Pathak to discuss why building robot brains is the future of AI. How does that work? Deepak reveals that and much more, including how videos are training their robots, what Skild AI plans to do with the $1.4 billion in funding they just raised, and why Pittsburgh is a better headquarters than Silicon Valley. Stick around for Deepak to even reveal his favorite sci-fi movie! This special episode is produced in partnership with Lightspeed. Lightspeed holds the largest early-stage AI portfolio in the world both number of companies and cap…

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  • This is the 'problem' with robotics for the last seven decades: Skild AI CEO

    January 18, 2026 · 📺 Fox Business

    Skild AI co-founder and CEO Deepak Pathak explains how robots are trained by watching humans perform tasks and more on 'The Claman Countdown.' #fox #media #us #usa #new #news #foxbusiness #technology #tech #robotics #artificialintelligence #ai #innovation #future #automation #science #engineering #business #humanoidrobot Subscribe to Fox Business: https://bit.ly/2D9Cdse Watch more Fox Business Video: https://video.foxbusiness.com Watch Fox Business Network Live: http://www.foxnewsgo.com/ FOX Business Network (FBN) is a financial news channel delivering real-time information across all platf…

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  • Actuate 2025: Any Robot, Any Task, One Brain: A Path to General Intelligence with Deepak Pathak

    November 12, 2025 · 📺 Foxglove

    Actuate 2025: Foxglove's developer conference for people who build robots. Deepak Pathak is CEO & Co-Founder of Skild AI and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University working on developing an AI foundation model for robotics. He is known for pioneering contributions to AI including self-supervised learning, artificial curiosity and sim2real adaptation for robot learning. Deepak has received several prestigious honors including Sloan Fellow, MIT TR 35under35, Okawa Fellow, IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award and multiple Best Paper Awards. Deepak's research has been featured in popular press outlets,…

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The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →