Robots are waiting for a ChatGPT moment: Nvidia's Les Karpas explains why at Disrupt 2026

Robots are waiting for a ChatGPT moment: Nvidia’s Les Karpas explains why at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

Nvidia's Les Karpas said at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 that robotics is still waiting for its ChatGPT moment. He argued robots lack a general-purpose foundation model like LLMs, so every task requires training from scratch, driving up cost and slowing deployment. Karpas didn't give a timeline but said hardware and simulation are ready—the bottleneck is data and training paradigms.