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I had my first robotaxi experience in San Francisco a few months ago. Magical is the only word for it.
A white Jaguar Waymo pulled up with a spinning sensor on its roof that looked like a high-tech crown.
I got in, and the screen welcomed me by name: “Good afternoon, Stephen. Heading to The Interval at Long Now… This experience may feel futuristic… We’ll do all the driving.” I pressed “start ride,” and we were off.
It’s surreal to see the steering wheel turn itself. The strangest part was the silence. No forced chitchat. Just the soft hum of the electric engine and the distinct feeling that I had arrived in the future.
When I took a regular Uber to the airport later, it felt like trading in my iPhone for one of those old Nokia bricks, back when Snake was the mobile game.
This was my “the future is here” moment. The robot revolution isn’t some distant sci-fi fantasy. It’s cruising down San Francisco streets right now, picking up passengers and dropping them off like it’s no big deal.
Self-driving taxis are just the visible tip of a massive wave of robotics innovation about to reshape everything.
2025 is the year of the robot. Time to buckle up...
There are now over 4.3 million machines in warehouses and factories globally.
As you can see, worldwide installations have jumped above half a million for three years running:
Source: International Federation of Robotics
But these aren’t the versatile helpers we dreamed of. They’re more like industrial savants—brilliant at one specific task, useless at everything else.
These robots are incredibly precise, but incredibly dumb. A robot arm can weld the same spot perfectly a million times. But move the target by an inch, and it’s lost. Want it to do something new? That means weeks of reprogramming.
Good news. Robots just got a brain transplant, courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI). The ChatGPT moment for robotics is coming, and it’s about to change everything.
Think about how you’d teach a child to fold laundry. You wouldn’t hand them a thousand-page manual covering every possible way a shirt could be crumpled. You’d show them a few times, and they’d figure it out.
Until now, robots couldn’t learn like this. They needed that thousand-page manual for every task.
Startup Physical Intelligence recently showed off a robot that can fold laundry. Previous bots needed explicit programming for every possible variation of a crumpled shirt.
Physical Intelligence’s robot learned by watching videos of humans folding clothes. It can handle whatever messy pile of laundry you throw at it, figuring out the best approach on its own.
A robot apprentice mastering a skill by observation.
At Johns Hopkins University, researchers created a surgical robot that learned complex procedures simply by watching videos of human surgeons.
It not only matched human performance in tasks—like suturing and tissue manipulation—but performed them 30% faster. If the bot drops a needle, it automatically picks it up and continues without being specifically programmed to do so.
The secret behind these innovations is the same breakthrough that supercharged language models: the transformer.
Transformer algorithms allowed computers to not just read words one by one but understands the context. How each word relates to every other, predicting what comes next.
Just as ChatGPT understands the relationships between words to write coherent sentences, these new AI robots understand the relationships between objects and actions in the real world. They’re gaining “physical intelligence.”
Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang recently said, “Everything that moves will be robotic.”
I agree, and the revolution is already unfolding all around us.
Delivery drones humming overhead. Compact warehouse robots that can squeeze through narrow aisles. Robotic arms that can work alongside humans in restaurants and factories. Even unassuming robot vacuum cleaners, like Matic, are finally becoming genuinely effective home helpers.
A decade from now, purpose-built machines embedding AI and physical intelligence will seem as normal as smartphones are today.
I was chatting with a hedge fund manager in London recently who told me about George Osborne, the former UK Chancellor, taking his first robotaxi ride in China. His reaction was the same as mine: “Holy cow, these things can actually drive!”
Self-driving cars didn’t just get a little better lately. They took a quantum leap forward, and it’s all because of AI.
Tesla’s (TSLA) self-driving tech used to be like a student memorizing a massive rulebook. Yellow light, slow down. Spot a cyclist? Give them space. It memorized 300,000+ rules, which made the system brittle.
Tesla threw out the rulebook and replaced all that human code with an AI system. Instead of following rules, the car now makes decisions based on what it sees.
Tesla’s self-driving tech improved 100X in 2024, measured by how often humans needed to take over the wheel. More progress in one year than the previous 10 combined!
As Tesla scales up its AI infrastructure, we’ll see another huge leap forward. The skeptics who claimed self-driving cars were decades away are about to be humiliated.
Robotaxis will be the first widespread AI robots that change people’s lives. If you live in or visit a city with robotaxis like Waymo, Zoox, Wayve (UK), Pony.ai (China), take a ride. Experience the future for yourself.
And self-driving cars are just the visible frontier of the robo-revolution.
Beneath the ocean’s surface, Irish startup Ulysses is deploying teams of autonomous underwater drones—nicknamed “Robo Sharks”—to become marine gardeners. These underwater robots are planting seagrass, a vital ecosystem that captures carbon 35X more effectively than rainforests.
On land, precision-farming robots reduce herbicide use by 90%, their sensors detecting and treating individual weeds instead of spraying entire fields. Meanwhile, driverless tractors guided by satellites plow perfect rows through the night.
As Jensen said, “Everything that moves will be robotic.” Get ready for all kinds of weird and wonderful AI robots to enter our world.
Even robotic police dogs—like “Roscoe” in Massachusetts, which recently faced gunfire and likely saved human lives in a standoff.
Today, robots in factories are still mostly one-trick ponies.
Programmed for repetitive motions in choreographed settings, repeatedly making the same weld in the same spot on an assembly line or dropping the same item into the same box.
AI allows robots to learn new things.
Soon, the same robot that unloads trucks in the morning could help assemble products in the afternoon and organize inventory at night. We’re moving from single-purpose machines to versatile helpers that can understand and follow instructions.
For decades, American manufacturing has lost out to countries with cheaper labor. But AI changes the math. Now, robots can work 24/7, never get tired, and can learn new tasks overnight.
Suddenly, America’s advantages—cheap energy, strong infrastructure, and AI expertise—matter more than low wages.
Picture a handful of people overseeing thousands of robots running a factory. Now, imagine if America were full of these factories. We could produce 1,000X more stuff for a fraction of today’s costs. When THAT happens (it’s already started), it could create trillions of dollars in wealth.
Remember the old dream of “Made in USA”? It’s felt like a nostalgic slogan.
Take phones. A company called Purism created a fully “Made in USA” phone. Great idea, but it costs $1,600… and you can get an equivalent Android phone for $300. That’s the old math. With AI-powered robots, we can change that equation.
It’s no exaggeration to say self-learning robots can reindustrialize America. They can turn “Made in America” from a feel-good slogan into a badge of cutting-edge innovation.
This will be one of the biggest investment opportunities in the next decade. And it’s only getting started.
AI + robotics means innovation can come from anywhere, accelerating the pace of breakthroughs.
The robots are coming, and they’re creating a whole new world of investing opportunities. This is the year the physical AI revolution truly begins.
In my weekly investment letter—The Jolt—I help readers position themselves ahead of world-changing disruptions like AI, robotics, and much more. In short: The Jolt is where innovation meets investing.