Physical AI has become a real trend over the past year. At CES (Consumer Electronics Show), NVIDIA's Jensen Huang declared 2026 the "ChatGPT moment for physical AI." Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology published a policy brief ranking it alongside ImageNet (2012) and ChatGPT (2022) as a genuine inflection point. Deloitte and BCG both published major reports on it in 2026. But some call it just a buzzword - a marketing rebrand of robotics work that's been happening for years. So is there something real here, or is it just hype? What physical AI actually means Physical AI refers to AI systems that perceive real environments through sensors, reason about them, and take physical action. The key difference from traditional robotics is generalization - these systems adapt to novel situations rather than repeating pre-programmed routines. The key components: Vision-language-action (VLA) models - the core architectural shift.…