Nvidia’s ‘Physical AI’ Push Advances Real-World Robots that Experts Say Will Shape the Next AI Race

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang unveiled Cosmos 3 Edge in Japan on July 15 as part of the company’s broader push into “Physical AI,” expanding its efforts beyond generative AI and into real-world robotics and autonomous systems.

“Cosmos 3 Edge, a new addition to the NVIDIA Cosmos 3 open world model family, that brings frontier capabilities to NVIDIA Jetson, helping embodied systems see, reason in real time and predict robot actions locally,” Nvidia said in a press release.

NVIDIA Cosmos 3 is NVIDIA’s open physical AI foundation model created to aid robots, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent machines comprehend, predict, and perform in the real world. It is part of NVIDIA’s strategy to take AI past digital assistants and into physical settings — what the company terms Physical AI.

Physical AI is the AI that can sense, reason, imitate, and act in the actual world, as the next major frontier after generative AI. This means that it can support robots to function including medical robots who can mechanize lab tasks; operate several features of the self-driving vehicles; robotize complete factory systems and enhance the operational effectiveness of drones.  

The launch event of Cosmos 3 Edge, also announced Nvidia’s partnership with leading Japanese robotics and industry leaders like Toyota, FANUC, NEC, SoftBank and highlighted Japan’s robotics and manufacturing ecosystem as a key partner in deploying AI-powered machines.

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Dr. Amrit Chandan, co-founder of Lorefully, an AI start-up in London, told Vision Times that AI is moving out of screen into the actual world and that makes human judgement all the more important. 

“I think Jensen Huang is right,” he said. “A robot may understand its physical environment, but it is unable to tell a business which problems customers want solved, where workers will trust automation, or what a community will reject. That intelligence lives across thousands of human perspectives.”

He believes organizations that understand how AI impacts people and use that comprehension to make informed decisions and not just limit themselves to deploying physical products will win.

“A clever machine is useful. A clever guess is still a guess,” Chandan said. 

Huang visited Korea and Taiwan in succession before his Tokyo visit previewing the Physical AI technology and Nvidia’s focus on Japan is because of its “competitiveness in manufacturing and the robotics industry,” Chosun Biz reported.

Sahar Tahvilli, an Europe based AI researcher and engineering leader, told Vision Times that “Physical AI” is the future of AI, rather than chatbots. 

“The real transformation will happen when AI moves beyond generating text and starts perceiving, reasoning, and acting safely in the physical world through autonomous vehicles, robotics, manufacturing, energy systems, and critical infrastructure,” she said. 

Tahvilli said competition in the next phase of AI will be determined not only by the performance of individual models but by companies’ ability to provide an entire ecosystem—including computing infrastructure, industrial data, simulation, safety engineering, standards, and trust.

She believes that the real challenge is no longer building more capable AI models but is building trustworthy AI systems that can be verified, validated, certified, monitored, and safely deployed in safety-critical environments.