Boston Dynamics hands the keys to Amazon's former AGI chief

Boston Dynamics has a new CEO, and he comes from the language-model side of the industry. Rohit Prasad took over on October 7.

Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon, most recently as senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence, and he led development of Nova, Amazon's family of foundation models for business customers. Before that he did 14 years of machine-learning research at Raytheon BBN Technologies, much of it for the US government. He replaces Robert Playter, who stepped down in February after six years as CEO and more than three decades at the company.

From demo reel to product line

The hire tells you where Hyundai, which owns Boston Dynamics, wants it to go. For years the company was the world's most famous robotics highlight reel: robot dogs on stairs, a backflipping Atlas, parkour clips with tens of millions of views. Now Hyundai is moving toward full ownership and planning humanoid production at scale, and Prasad's job is what the industry calls physical AI, meaning robots that can do useful work without someone scripting every move.

That's mostly a software problem. The bodies are already good. What Atlas needs is a brain that can cope with a messy factory floor, which is close to what Prasad spent the last decade building, except that one lived in a speaker on your kitchen counter.

Sources: The Boston Globe, Manufacturing Dive, AI Magazine.