Food handling is an area of work that still relies heavily on humans. Fruit, vegetables, meat, and other foods need to be handled quickly but gently. It is also hard to automate because no two pieces of fruit, vegetables, or chicken nuggets look exactly the same. Eka’s demos suggest that the company may be onto something big. I found myself mentally comparing their robots to GPT-1, OpenAI’s first large language model, developed four years before ChatGPT. GPT-1 was often incoherent but showed glimmers of general linguistic intelligence. The robots I saw seem to have a similar kind of nascent physical intelligence. When I watched a video of one reaching for a set of keys in slow motion, I noticed it did something that seemed remarkably human: It touched the tips of its grippers to the table and slid them along the surface before making contact with the keys and securing them between its digits. Eka’s algorithms seem to know instinctively how to recover from a fumble. This kind of thing is difficult for other robots …