Last Friday, I wrote some special coverage for my TAZR Trader members on the SIGGRAPH computer vision event that NVIDIA ((NVDA Quick QuoteNVDA - Free Report) ) attended in Vancouver. I include those notes below under "Robots From The Matrix" and don't miss the video of a humanoid running over a human in the 1500 meters.

Little did I know that Jensen & Co. were planning a virtual robot party this week, with much to celebrate and new innovations right around the corner, ahead of the company earnings report next week.

This week, NVIDIA is celebrating the more than 2 million developers now using the NVIDIA robotics stack. These builders are reshaping industries across manufacturing, food delivery, agriculture, healthcare, facilities maintenance and much more.

The NVIDIA Robotics group has been featuring innovations from partners like Peer Robotics, Serve Robotics, Carbon Robotics, Lucid Bots, Diligent Robotics and Dexmate.

You may have seen Serve robot carts delivering food or other items on busy city streets. Those cute camera "eyes," big buggy wheels, and friendly yellow safety flag fit right in on the sidewalk. I picture a toddler to pop his head out anytime.

The NVIDIA team is going to wrap up the week on Friday with a special product announcement. From the blog...

The next-generation NVIDIA Jetson Thor platform is built for physical AI and humanoid robotics. It supports any popular AI framework and generative AI model and is fully compatible with NVIDIA’s software stack from cloud to edge, including NVIDIA Isaac for robotics simulation and development, Isaac GR00T humanoid robot foundation models, NVIDIA Metropolis for vision AI and NVIDIA Holoscan for real-time sensor processing.

There’s a staggering number of industry-changing applications in the market enabled by NVIDIA Jetson. We’ll be featuring just some of the companies here daily all week, and stay tuned: some exciting product news is coming on the last day.

To find out first on Friday morning, my recommendation is to follow @NVIDIANewsroom, @NVIDIARobotics, and @KevinBCook on X to stay up to date on all the latest.

Robots From The Matrix
Originally posted on 8/15/25

TAZR Traders

It was a fascinating week for AI and Robotics as NVIDIA presented at SIGGRAPH, the premier computer graphics conference which took place in Vancouver through Thursday.

NVIDIA Research leaders delivered highlights of the key graphics and simulation innovations enabling physical and spatial AI.

This blog post summarizes many of the innovations around the central theme of worker safety in a world of hybrid human-robotic teams...

Making Safer Spaces: NVIDIA and Partners Bring Physical AI to Cities and Industrial Infrastructure

Be sure to visit that one this weekend as it has a compelling graphic with the economic and human stats at stake in this new world of work we are entering, plus lots of research links and Five Companies Advancing Physical AI.

But check out this video clip now which wonderfully illustrates why we need plenty of training and guardrails for our humanoid work buddies...

Unitree wins the gold medal for the 1500m run at the World Humanoid Robot Games

Breaking: As I'm writing this at the beach, a group of differently-abled adults came by my table. An especially curious young man named Steven, standing about 6"4", wanted to know what I was doing on my laptop. So of course I asked him if he played video games and what he thought about how much better the graphics had become in the last 5-10 years (10X? 100X? 1,000X?).

Anyway, Steven likes to tell jokes and after I showed him the video above of a robot running over a human, he said with a grin "That's unsportsmanlike! You should put that in your article. It's a joke."

He also had more to say about GPUs... "I like all kinds of chips... Doritos, Crunchers... you see, that's a joke." He made me laugh and made my day.

NVIDIA Research Shapes Physical AI

As you know, two of the most exciting reasons for me to stay long NVIDIA and the surrounding AI Revolution are (1) the platforms and tools for science & engineering research and innovation, and (2) the simulation platforms and tools that empower those researchers.

With Omniverse, NASA and BMW simulate next-gen R&D. And now with Cosmos and Isaac GR00T, AI and graphics research breakthroughs in neural rendering, 3D generation and world simulation will power amazing advances in humanoid robotics and autonomous vehicles.

Remember, we still haven't crossed that threshold where enough people trust self-driving and that's why NVIDIA's foundational work is still so important. I've said many times in the past 5 years that SIMULATION is everything for the training of physical world models.

One of the oldest and best examples is when an NVIDIA 4,000 GPU cluster was used in 2017 to train the European Space Agency telescope Euclid as it set out to map the universe looking for dark matter and dark energy. Knowing that the telescope would consume terabytes of data each day, the scientists and engineers wanted to model and simulate 25 billion galaxies before they sent the equipment into space.

Is This Just a Simulation?

You may have seen the word "NIRATIAS" which is an acronym that stands for "Nothing Is Real And This Is A Simulation".

It's a fun concept that people throw around as they fantasize (or doomerize) that we unconsciously live in "The Matrix."

Only in this case, NVIDIA is helping researchers reverse-engineer "any matrix" to create real-world innovations.

“AI is advancing our simulation capabilities, and our simulation capabilities are advancing AI systems,” said Sanja Fidler, vice president of AI research at NVIDIA. “There’s an authentic and powerful coupling between the two fields, and it’s a combination that few have.”

If you really want to dig into the details of how NVIDIA is accomplishing all of this, start with this post from SIGGRAPH, which will lead to other blog links, papers, and relevant partners...

NVIDIA Opens Portals to World of Robotics With New Omniverse Libraries, Cosmos Physical AI Models and AI Computing Infrastructure

Physical AI = Embodied "Edge" Intelligence

There's a lot of new terminology surrounding the AI revolution. But to keep it simple, just think about how we connect hardware and software to make them operate in feedback loops.

Right now, a ton of AI workloads are dependent on the cloud to connect them. But after robots and other autonomous machines are trained and let loose in the wild, they may not always have a good connection to the cloud.

That's where "edge" applications become extremely important to run machines autonomously... and safely. As we've seen with humanoids running over humans, the robots may indeed be coming for us. But it might be a softer revolution at first.

Jason Calacanis is as outspoken as they come among Silicon Valley elite VC. But he's also well plugged-in to the companies and trends shaping the future. So when he speaks, I listen. Here's his robot prediction...

“Before 2030 you're going to see Amazon, which has massively invested in AI, replace all factory workers and all drivers. It will be 100% robotic, which means all of those workers are going away. Every Amazon worker. UPS, gone. FedEx, gone.”

If he's right, Jensen has his work cut out for him. Not necessarily because Amazon needs NVIDIA to build the necessary infrastructure.

But because the rest of the world will.

One last question from Steven: "Will we have a Jetsons future with robots or a Terminator future with robots?"

I told him I was betting on a Jetsons future... because I'm betting on Morpheus... err Jensen.

And that means I'll get to meet more incredible people like Steven in real life.

BREAKING: NVIDIA denies report by WCCFtech that it is developing humanoid robots. "NVIDIA builds core technologies and infrastructure for robot makers to build robots – we are not developing or manufacturing our own robots."

Jensen & Co. doing what they do best -- giving the Elroy Jetsons of the world their favorite power tools!

Kevin Cook is a senior strategist for Zacks Investment Research where he runs the TAZR Trader portfolio and spends most of his time following the innovations of NVIDIA that are creating new multi-trillion-dollar industries.