The ChatGPT moment for robotics is coming

The is the EngineAI SE01 walking around in Shenzhen, showcasing its advanced mobility and human-like gait: Watch the video here. Chinese robotics has been making significant steps in developing humanoid robots with advanced capabilities. China already dominates the industrial robotics sector and has the world’s highest number of industrial robots in operation, with a density of 322 robots per 10,000 workers. With the advent of AI powered humanoid robots, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has been encouraging mass production, with the goal by the end of 2025 to have 1 million AI-powered units working across residential, industrial, and commercial sectors. Back at CES, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang outlined the company’s vision for the next phases of AI development. He described a shift from today’s generative AI towards “agentic AI”, and ultimately to “physical AI”. Along with new hardware, the centrepiece was Nvidia Cosmos, a new computing platform designed to accelerate physical AI development in robotics and autonomous vehicles. Using photo-real, physics-based synthetic data, Cosmos aims to make the development of self-driving cars and humanoid robots more accessible by reducing the need for costly real-world testing. Ride-sharing company Uber is among the first to adopt the platform. Takeaways: “The ChatGPT moment for robotics is coming,” Huang said, highlighting how world foundation models could democratise physical AI development in the same way large language models transformed text generation.