On Robotics and "Physical AI"

Last week, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang shared the following comments at an industry conference:

• "The next wave of AI is here. Robotics, powered by physical AI, will revolutionize industries

• “Physical AIs are models that can understand instructions and autonomously perform complex tasks in the real world

• “Multimodal LLMs are breakthroughs that enable robots to learn, perceive and understand the world around them, and plan how they’ll act,

• “One day, everything that moves will be autonomous.”

Separately, comments from The Economist article “Robots are suddenly getting cleverer. What’s changed?” included:

• “There is more to AI than ChatGP ...

• "A key step towards applying ai to robots was the development of “multimodal” models—ai models trained on different kinds of data.

• “The new models being used in robotics take this idea one step further. These “vision-language-action models” (vlams) take in text and images, plus data relating to the robot’s presence in the physical world, including the readings on internal sensors, the degree of rotation of different joints and the positions of actuators (such as grippers, or the fingers of a robot’s hands)."

 OUR TAKE

• “Physical AI” opportunities extend across many sectors including industrial/ logistics, agriculture, transportation, defense/military and medical/health care.

• Like other areas of AI, this “next wave” of solutions need to 1) ensure the privacy and security of data, 2) address transparency concerns about algorithm bias and 3) reduce the high power consumption associated with processing complex data models

• Successful efforts will require a “fusion” of skills and technology to assess and integrate a complex mix of data (text, audio, video, 3D, etc.) and processes.