A robot’s claw hurtles toward a light bulb on a table. I wince, waiting for the crunch. But suddenly the claw decelerates. It starts gingerly pawing around the table, as if searching for its glasses on the nightstand. It gently positions the bulb between its two pincers. The bulb rolls away. The claw goes chasing it across the table. After a few nips, the bulb is back in its grasp. The robot swiftly screws the bulb into a nearby socket, illuminating its work area.

In more than a decade of writing about robots, I have never seen one move so naturally. Most are ham-fisted klutzes, even when remotely controlled by a person. Of the few dozen robot arms on the market today, not one can screw in a light bulb.

I have come to visit Eka, a startup located in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a short walk from MIT and a slightly longer bike ride from my home. The company’s office is small, and it’s packed with different robot arms, assorted grippers and hands, and tables covered with odd knicknacks of different shapes, sizes, and textures—gloves, small boxes of earplugs, hairbrushes, key rings, and so on.

Watching Eka’s robot in action reminds me of the first time I tried talking to ChatGPT. The robots are so fluid, so natural-seeming, that I can’t help but feel there’s something genuinely intelligent, if not quite human, behind them.

In a conference room not far from the robots, Eka’s cofounders, Pulkit Agrawal, a professor at MIT, and Tuomas Haarnoja, an ex-Google DeepMind robotics researcher, lay out their vision for the curious new machine. “A couple of years ago, we realized that dexterity can finally be cracked,” Agrawal says.