ChatGPT marked the big bang moment of generative AI. Answers can be generated in response to nearly any query, helping transform digital work such as content creation, customer service, software development and business operations for knowledge workers.
Physical AI, the embodiment of artificial intelligence in humanoids, factories and other devices within industrial systems, has yet to experience its breakthrough moment.
This has held back industries such as transportation and mobility, manufacturing, logistics and robotics. But that’s about to change thanks to three computers bringing together advanced training, simulation and inference.
The Rise of Multimodal, Physical AI
For 60 years, “Software 1.0” — serial code written by human programmers — ran on general-purpose computers powered by CPUs.
Then, in 2012, Alex Krizhevsky, mentored by Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton, won the ImageNet computer image recognition competition with AlexNet, a revolutionary deep learning model for image classification.
This marked the industry’s first contact with AI. The breakthrough of machine learning — neural networks running …