Robotics Is Still Waiting for Its ChatGPT Moment. Nvidia's Les Karpas Will Explain Why at Disrupt.

ChatGPT's November 2022 debut pulled large language models out of the research lab and into everyday life practically overnight. Robotics has been talked about, funded, and built for just as long — arguably longer — and yet it still hasn't had its equivalent breakout. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, Nvidia's Les Karpas will take the Real World AI Stage to explain what's standing in the way, in a session titled "Robots Are Waiting for Their ChatGPT Moment. Here Is What Is Standing in the Way."

Karpas is unusually well-placed to make the case. As Nvidia Inception's Global Head of Physical AI, he coordinates the chipmaker's relationship with the startup ecosystem spanning robotics, automotive, manufacturing, mobility, and smart cities — precisely the companies trying to crack this problem. His résumé reads like a cross-section of the field itself: stints at Stanley Black & Decker, Intellectual Ventures, Herman Miller, iRobot, and even Cirque du Soleil, across roles from architect and manufacturing engineer to startup CEO, venture studio executive, and corporate venture capitalist.

The all-too-real bottleneck

Karpas's core point is easy to say and brutally hard to fix: nobody has an internet-wide dataset for physical AI. OpenAI, Anthropic, and their peers built language models on the entire public web. Waymo and other self-driving fleets manufactured their own data advantage through years of accumulated road miles, datasets that keep growing market by market.

General-purpose robots have no equivalent. A growing crop of startups is trying to manufacture that scale artificially — simulation, synthetic data, and foundation models trained across many robot forms at once. Karpas will be joined on the stage by founders from Shield AI, Colossal Biosciences, FieldAI, and Foxglove to walk through how they're attacking that digital-to-physical gap.

Why Nvidia cares

If you've watched a Jensen Huang keynote in the last few years, you know Nvidia is bullish on robotics — the company is positioning its hardware and software stack as the platform the robot economy runs on. Karpas's session is the strategy made explicit: the single biggest bottleneck in physical AI is data, and whoever helps solve it shapes the industry's winners.

Disrupt runs October 13–15 at San Francisco's Moscone West, with 10,000-plus founders, investors, and tech leaders expected. Tickets save up to $200 before prices rise on September 25, with 30% off for group bundles. For anyone betting that robotics gets its breakthrough this decade, this is the conversation to be in the room for.

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