During a recent trip to Beijing, a journalist posed an intriguing question to Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia: “If you were a 22-year-old Jensen, freshly graduated from university in 2025 with the same ambitions, what would you focus on?” Huang’s response was striking: “A young 20-something Jensen graduating today would likely lean toward physical sciences rather than computer science.”
Huang is a firm believer in “Physical AI,” which he deems the “next wave” in technology. Reflecting on the past 15 years, he outlined the evolution of AI in distinct phases. The first wave, “Perception AI,” emerged 12-14 years ago with the advent of AlexNet, enabling computers to recognize images.
This was followed by the second wave, “Generative AI,” where AI learned to interpret meaning and translate it across formats — languages, images, code, and more. We’re now in the era of “Reasoning AI,” where systems can understand, create, solve problems, and handle unfamiliar scenarios.
The next frontier, according to Huang, is “Physical AI.” He explains, “The next wave requires understanding the laws of physics — friction, inertia, cause and effect.” This involves grasping concepts like object permanence (objects exist even when unseen), predicting a ball’s trajectory, or determining the force needed to grasp an item without damaging it. “When you take this Physical AI and put it into a physical object — a robot — you get robotics,” he added.
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Huang sees this as a critical direction, predicting it will shape the future. “I hope that in the next decade, as we build a new generation of factories, they’ll be highly automated and help address the global labor shortage,” he said. For aspiring innovators, his advice is clear: mastering physics could be the key to riding the next technological wave.
