Solving a Rubik’s cube is old news for robots. Rigid, purpose-built machines have been cracking it in under a second for years. The hard part, the part that has stumped roboticists for decades, is doing it with a hand that looks and moves like yours. Five fingers, human-scale joints, the same fine motor control required to crack an egg or press a piano key without destroying either. That’s what Genesis AI is showing off, and that’s why the Rubik’s cube is actually worth mentioning.
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The Genesis AI team, which had been operating out of stealth since July 2022 when it raised $105 million in its first seed round from Khosla Ventures, has now launched its first foundation model, GENE-26.5, along with an unexpected addition: robotic hands, completely homegrown and full stack.
It’s the hands that make everything interesting. Most robotics companies have been perfectly content to keep their hands limited to two-fingered grippers, but Genesis chose otherwise, designing a set of human-sized, human-shaped, and complete-with-five-fingers robotic hands. And the logic behind this decision is simple. When your robotic hand mimics a human hand in both appearance and movement, you can train your robot using any amount of human data without worrying about something researchers call the “embodiment gap.” This gap is precisely why most humanoid robots continue to move as if they’ve just woken up after a lengthy sleep.
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In the demonstration video, the hands break eggs, slice tomatoes, blend smoothies, play the piano, and even solve a Rubik’s cube – all while using the same pair of hands. Genesis cofounder Théophile Gervet, who previously served as a research scientist for Mistral AI, highlights the cooking process as his favorite part of the demo, not because it’s particularly impressive, but because it involves an uninterrupted series of challenging actions done in succession.
There’s also the neat wearable glove that’s been introduced, a data-gathering instrument that is supposed to be worn during actual work processes. The movement patterns from lab technicians, manufacturing personnel, and pharma professionals would be collected and used to train models in real-time, which is an ambitious request, but Genesis’ founders are not shy about admitting they’re still working out some of the kinks.
Genesis CEO Zhou Xian has already promised many future iterations of GENE are coming. A full-body robot is next on the roadmap. The hands, it turns out, were just the beginning.
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