@adlrocha - Form Before Data: The Real Bottleneck for Physical AI

A reader messaged me last week with a question about a topic that has been in my backlog for a few months now, AI and the physical world. The request was the following “Can you elaborate on the rate of adoption of AI for the physical world? We see [it] operating almost entirely in the digital realm. The Tesla FSD vehicles are examples of AI moving in the physical world. We are also beginning to see other machines such as humanoid robots move through space by interpreting the visual field. But these examples are still very uncommon.”He’s right, and while “still very uncommon”, the field is making progress fast. We have AI that writes code, drafts contracts, and passes the bar, and we have a handful of cars and factory robots, and almost nothing in between. But my feeling is that the gap isn’t intelligence, I think the models and foundational technology is there. What we are missing is the right “body” and “senses” for the model to make sense of the world, and the data needed to teach…