Physical AI

Rising · emerged November 2024 · high August 2026 · +32% on the month before · 40 mentions on Trending in 14 days

Models that perceive and act in the physical world: robots, self-driving and the simulators that train them. Named by Nvidia: NVIDIA Launches Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform to Accelerate Physical AI Development (Jan 6, 2025). Also called Embodied AI, Robot foundation models, Vision-language-action models, VLA.

Index 0 to 100, monthly

Signals

Signal	Value	Reads as
Hacker News stories, last 12 months86 stories	86 stories	Adoption
arXiv papers, last 12 months2,139 papers	2,139 papers	Adoption
Wikipedia views, August 20261,497	1,497	Adoption
Product releases naming it1 since Sep 1, 2025	1 since Sep 1, 2025	Adoption
GitHub repositories1,594	1,594	Adoption
Funding rounds naming it1, $900M in all	1, $900M in all	Adoption

Companies

Name	Mentions
XPENG Robotics	2
Hugging Face	1

Releases

1 release since Sep 1, 2025

Name	Date
Diffusers 0.39.0: New image and video pipelines, core library improvements, and moreHugging Face · Jul 3, 2026 2 months ago	Jul 3, 20262 months ago

Papers

Name	Date
Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AINVIDIA · Jun 1, 2026 3 months ago	Jun 1, 20263 months ago

GitHub projects

1,594 repositories

Name	Created	Stars
Genesis-Embodied-AI/genesis-worldSimulation platform for general-purpose robotics & embodied AI learning. · Oct 31, 2023 2 years ago	Oct 31, 20232 years ago	29,983
TianxingChen/Embodied-AI-Guide[Lumina具身智能社区] 具身智能技术指南 Embodied-AI-Guide · May 17, 2024 2 years ago	May 17, 20242 years ago	16,178
facebookresearch/habitat-simA flexible, high-performance 3D simulator for Embodied AI research. · Feb 4, 2019 7 years ago	Feb 4, 20197 years ago	3,823
jonyzhang2023/awesome-embodied-vla-va-vlnA curated list of state-of-the-art research in embodied AI, focusing on vision-language-action (VLA) models, vision-language navigation (VLN · Jan 16, 2025 1 year ago	Jan 16, 20251 year ago	3,553
facebookresearch/habitat-labA modular high-level library to train embodied AI agents across a variety of tasks and environments. · Feb 4, 2019 7 years ago	Feb 4, 20197 years ago	3,142
Octoday-Hub/Embodied-AI「Octoday Hub 星期八具身智能生态社区」聚合论文、项目、课程、工具、数据集、招聘等资源，连接全球开发者、研究者与产业伙伴。 · May 10, 2026 4 months ago	May 10, 20264 months ago	2,625

Funding

1 round

Name	Date	Amount
XPENG RoboticsSeries A · Aug 24, 2026 4 weeks ago	Aug 24, 20264 weeks ago	$900M

Movement	Stage
Humanoid robotsGeneral-purpose robots shaped like people, now driven by learned models instead of hand-written control.	Peak
World modelsModels that learn how an environment behaves and can simulate it, for games, video and training robots.	Rising
Multimodal AIModels that read and write more than text: images, audio and video in the same model.	Peak

History

Date	What changed
Sep 24, 2026	Tracking started: emerged November 2024, rising, 4 other names recorded

Sources: Curve: Hacker News story titles, Wikipedia pageviews and arXiv papers by month, refreshed Sep 24, 2026. Related entities from the fru.dev sites' public APIs, matched by name. How stages work.