Why Physical AI Needed a Completely New Data Stack

Why Physical AI Needed a Completely New Data Stack

From Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI by Lukas Biewald

December 16, 2025 · 1h 1m · Season 1 · Episode 133

About this episode

Lukas Biewald discusses with Nikolaus West the challenges of implementing physical AI and the innovative data solutions provided by Rerun.

The future of AI is physical.  In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks to Nikolaus West, CEO of Rerun, about why the breakthrough required to get AI out of the lab and into the messy real world is blocked by poor data tooling.  Nikolaus explains how Rerun solved this by adopting an Entity Component System (ECS), a data model built for games, to handle complex, multimodal, time-aware sensor data. This is the technology that makes solving previously impossible tasks, like flexible manipulation, suddenly feel "boring."  Connect with us here:  Nikolaus West: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolauswest/ Rerun: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rerun-io/ Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/

People in this episode

Host: Lukas Biewald

Guest: Nikolaus West

Topics covered

  • physical AI
  • data stack
  • Entity Component System
  • sensor data
  • real world AI
  • data tooling

Keywords

  • physical AI
  • data stack
  • Entity Component System
  • multimodal data
  • sensor data
  • AI in real world

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Rerun, Weights & Biases

More episodes of Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI podcast page.