Physical AI
Physical AI refers to AI models that perceive and act in the physical world through robots or embodied hardware, rather than operating only on text or digital data. The shorthand for it is AI moving from bits to atoms. A language model handling a robot's vision, speech, and motor control in real time is physical AI.
Also known as: embodied ai, bits to atoms
Most AI applications operate entirely in software. Physical AI closes the loop with the world: a model takes in camera or sensor input, works out what to do, and issues actions that move a physical system like a robot arm or a walking robot. The underlying capabilities are the same ones other AI systems need, including vision, language understanding, and tool use. What changes is that the model runs against real-time constraints, and its mistakes land in a room rather than a chat window.
The current examples run general-purpose multimodal models directly on commodity robotics hardware, letting a robot follow spoken commands or navigate by sight without task-specific programming. A harder target, still mostly unbuilt, is automated scientific experimentation, where a model both designs an experiment and physically runs it.
