Is This Just IoT Evolved?

Physical AI is showing up across the industry as sensors, connected devices, and foundation models move from the cloud into the real world. After years of IoT wiring everything to the internet, the big shift is turning raw measurements and video into meaning, not just dashboards. For day-to-day teams, that changes how you monitor equipment, detect failures, and decide what to do next. When thousands of sensor streams hit storage, who turns them into insights and recommendations fast enough to matter? Can one model generalize across different sensors and conditions? And what must run on the asset versus the cloud?

Dr. Ivan Poupyrev is CEO and Founder of Archetype AI, where he is building a multimodal AI foundation model that combines real-time sensor data and natural language to help people and organizations better understand and act on the physical world. The company is developing a developer platform to unlock new applications of Physical AI across industries.

Previously, he was Director of Engineering at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) division, where he founded and led large cross-functional teams to create Soli, a radar-based sensing platform, and Jacquard, a connected apparel platform powered by smart textiles and embedded ML. These technologies shipped in more than 15 products across 33 countries, including collaborations with Levi’s, YSL, Adidas, and Samsonite, and were integrated into flagship devices such as Pixel 4 and Nest products. His work has been widely published, recognized with major international awards, and featured in global media.

In the episode, Richie and Ivan explore physical AI beyond robotics, turning IoT sensor streams into insights, recommendations, and automation, why physical foundation models differ from LLMs, sensor-fusion wins like wind-turbine failure alerts, edge deployment and privacy, how to pick a first project in practice, and much more.

Links Mentioned in the Show:

1. Archetype AI
2. Attention Is All You Need (Original Transformer Architecture Paper)
3. A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon, 1948)
4. Connect with Ivan
5. AI-Native Course: Intro to AI for Work
6. Related Episode: Enterprise AI Agents with Jun Qian, VP of Generative AI Services at Oracle
7. Explore AI-Native Learning on DataCamp

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