Venture panel: Physical AI hits data, safety and long-horizon hurdles
At a panel during the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo's "Digital Trade Venture Day" (Sept 22-24, Hangzhou), moderator Liu Huining of Huiyan Future and Tsinghua University, Puhua Group chairman Cao Guoxiong, Qiming Venture Partners investment partner Shen Jin and Gaoshan Xinyu founding partner Wang Xiang debated how Physical AI reaches industry. Cao said the field is still in a validation phase: demos work, but closed loops in real scenarios are unproven, with hotel delivery already solved while cleaning and hazardous-environment inspection are still in progress, and a humanoid form factor not necessarily required. Shen listed six infrastructure pillars — compute, data engineering, models, simulation and synthetic data, operating environment including safety, and body hardware — and said safety may be the final obstacle; Wang estimated physical-world data needs could be orders of magnitude larger than the hundreds of billions of tokens used by large language models, making real-world data collection critical. Cao added that a closed loop for an embodied "brain" may take at least five years.
The discussion highlights that data, safety and scenario-level closed loops — not demos alone — will decide which Physical AI companies create real value.