Matthew Johnson-Roberson on Why Physical AI Still Has a Missing Piece

Automated with Brian Heater · May 20, 2026 · 57m · transcript

Physical AI is moving fast.

But Matthew Johnson-Roberson says robotics is still missing something fundamental. The field has data, models, and momentum, but it still does not have the simple learning objective that helped language models scale so quickly.

In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Matthew Johnson-Roberson, founding dean of Vanderbilt’s College of Connected Computing, about why physical AI may not follow the same playbook as large language models.

Matthew explains why robotics still feels stuck between promise and deployment. We still do not live in a world where…