New Delhi, Feb. 27 -- Most of us were introduced to artificial intelligence (AI) through robots. The terrifying Terminators, Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics and the friendly robots of Japanese movies were the first intelligent machines we encountered. But when AI finally came, it was through machine learning algorithms behind online recommendation engines, the protein-folding miracles of DeepMind and the near-human chatbot of ChatGPT.

It is interesting how robots are coming back. Nvidia recently announced an investment in robotic startup Field, valued at $2 billion and revenue-positive. Another one, Skid, has raised money from SoftBank at a valuation of $4 billion, while Physical Intelligence raised half of that and released its first mo...