This AI-Powered Robot Keeps Going Even if You Attack It With a Chainsaw

A four-legged robot that keeps crawling even after all four of its legs have been hacked off with a chainsaw is the stuff of nightmares for most people.

For Deepak Pathak, cofounder and CEO of the startup Skild AI, the dystopian feat of adaptation is an encouraging sign of a new, more general kind of robotic intelligence.

“This is something we call an omni-bodied brain,” Pathak tells me. His startup developed the generalist artificial intelligence algorithm to address a key challenge with advancing…