ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and moved AI from hype into everyday use by giving people an easy way to work with large language models . Robotics has been in development for a long time but has not had a comparable breakthrough. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, Nvidia Inception's Les Karpas will explain why on the Real World AI Stage, in a session titled "Robots Are Waiting for Their ChatGPT Moment. Here Is What Is Standing in the Way."
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been openly bullish about robotics in his keynotes over the past few years. Karpas will cover the limitations and opportunities in AI and robotics at Disrupt, held October 13–15 at San Francisco's Moscone West. The event is expected to draw more than 10,000 tech leaders, founders and investors to a lineup focused on AI.
Karpas says the core limitation for general-purpose robots is that nobody has an internet-wide dataset for physical AI like the ones OpenAI, Anthropic and others had for language. Even self-driving fleets such as Waymo's built their datasets over years of road miles, and those datasets are still growing market by market. The problem is easy to understand but very hard to solve.
A growing number of startups are trying to create data at scale artificially through simulation, synthetic data and foundation models trained across many robot forms at once. The Real World AI Stage was created to address this challenge of bridging the digital and the physical. Founders from Shield AI, Colossal Biosciences, FieldAI and Foxglove will join Karpas to discuss the challenges and opportunities they face.
As Nvidia Inception 's Global Head of Physical AI, Karpas manages Nvidia's relationships with startups across robotics, automotive, manufacturing, mobility and smart cities. These are the same companies trying to close the data gap. His career includes roles at Stanley Black & Decker, Intellectual Ventures, Herman Miller, iRobot and Cirque du Soleil, where he worked as an architect, manufacturing engineer, startup CEO, venture studio executive and corporate venture capitalist.