Physical AI

This term describes AI that goes beyond generating text and images on a screen to actually move and act in the physical world. It covers the AI running in robots, self-driving cars, and factory machines. NVIDIA popularized it as "the next wave of AI," and it's now standard industry vocabulary.

It's an attempt to bring the winning formula of the digital world — big models plus massive data — into the physical world. But mistakes in the real world are costly (falling over, colliding with things), so this approach goes hand in hand with learning first in simulation and predicting outcomes using world models.