The "Embodied AI" Revolution (AI with a Sense of Place)
The Physics of Thought: Why AI Had to Leave the Screen to Find its Soul Back in the early days of AI, everything seemed so promising on paper. Models like ChatGPT could spit out essays, code snippets, and even jokes that felt almost human. But as we roll into 2026, something's become clear: all that chatter was missing the point. AI wasn't really understanding the world; it was just shuffling words around. Now, the real change is happening with what folks call embodied AI, systems that don't just process text but interact with the physical stuff around us, like gravity pulling things down or the way a door swings open. This shift from language models to world models isn't some minor upgrade; it's redefining what intelligence means in tech. Think about how we got here. Language models, those big neural networks trained on mountains of text, ruled the scene for years. They could answer questions, summarize books, or even pretend to be your therapist. Yet they stay...