Reasoning Models for Physical AI

ODSC AI West 2026

Oct 27, 2026 · Time to be announced

Reasoning models for Physical AI aim to enable embodied agents—such as robots and autonomous vehicles—to perceive, understand, and act in the real world through contextual and causal reasoning. In this talk, I’ll provide an overview of foundational concepts in reasoning-centric AI for physical systems, highlighting the emergence of chain-of-thought reasoning in autonomous driving models such as NVIDIA’s Alpamayo family, which bridges human-like reasoning with trajectory planning to improve handling of complex scenarios. I will discuss model design principles, training strategies that promote causal reasoning, tools and datasets for development and evaluation, and open challenges at the intersection of physical reasoning, safety, and real-world deployment.

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Hybrid · Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, Burlingame, California, United States

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