The future of robotics and Physical AI

Free-flowing thoughts, in the morning while I walk, about robotics and the future of general purpose robots.

Even if the bubble bursts, something stays

Investors are pouring huge amounts of money into artificial intelligence: ChatGPT, Anthropic, the Chinese models, the open weights ones. By now it’s clear that even if the so-called bubble bursts, something of enormous value will remain.

Agentic programming, summarizing and writing text, video, music: they’re here to stay. Maybe at a higher cost, we’ll see how the market settles.

When AI meets robots

The thing to think about is where and when all this intersects with robotics, the so-called Physical AI. Bipedal robots, wheeled robots, any shape.

Think of the droid army in Star Wars. With the military the intersection has already happened: just look at the drones in Russia and Iran. As we know, an effective technology finds its first applications in finance, which is economic warfare, and in the military, which is physical warfare.

How they get trained

I’m talking about this because I’ve started training a proprietary vision-language model for a Munich company that raised one of the biggest seed rounds in Europe, 55 million, to work on Physical AI.

The dataset gets built like this: a person wears a headband with a phone filming their hands while they tidy the house, do plumbing, electrical work, construction. All this data becomes the raw base on which, before long, maybe a year, humanoid robots will be trained.

There are lots of players, Italy included, luckily: in Genoa there’s Generative Bionics, a startup born from IIT. Great stuff.

Just a matter of time

In my opinion it’s just a matter of time, there’s no alternative. So it has to be done well, and regulated well: you don’t just take robots and send them around at random.

After a settling period, like with everything, it could be something extremely beneficial for the vast majority of people. But we need to be careful: those with a lot of capital will get a big return on investment, so it must be taxed and managed well. We already have the social infrastructure to do it, we just need to use it well.

What do you think? Write it in the comments on the video (it’s in Italian).