The Physical AI & Robotics Salon — NVIDIA GTC Week
Join us at Stanford Campus during NVIDIA GTC for a curated technical salon bringing together the engineers and researchers building the physical AI stack.
From the legendary Ben Katz (MIT Mini Cheetah, Boston Dynamics Atlas, Physical Intelligence) to teams at Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Physical Intelligence — this is a rare chance to get in the room with the minds defining the next era of robotics.
Expect robots running around the room and a side-by-side demo of the original MIT Mini dog and a modern-day dog — a decade of progress in dynamic robotics standing right next to each other!
Agenda
5:00 – 5:30 PM — Doors Open & Welcome Reception
5:30 – 6:10 PM — Fireside Chat: 🤖 The Hardware Behind the Hype: Actuators, Quadrupeds & Scaling Dynamic Robots Ben Katz (Physical Intelligence) x Bayley Wang (PrismaX)
The engineer behind the MIT Mini Cheetah and Boston Dynamics Atlas, live and unfiltered. Expect a side-by-side of two generations of quadrupeds, insider stories, and the technical truth behind what makes modern robots move.
6:15 – 6:45 PM — 🦾 The Humanoid Frontier Benjamin Bolte (OpenAI), Keerthana Gopalakrishnan (Google DeepMind), Ben Katz (Physical Intelligence) Moderated by Kun Peng (xBuilders)
Humanoids are shipping. What comes next? Researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Physical Intelligence tackle the hard problems: generalization, dexterity, real-world learning, and what it actually takes to make humanoids useful at scale.
6:50 – 7:50 PM — Social Hour & Networking Enjoy food, drinks, and good networking!
Salon Participants
Ben Katz — Physical Intelligence
Modern robotics practically owes its existence to the legendary Ben Katz. His graduate work at MIT's Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory laid the groundwork for mass-produced, dynamic electric robots — his actuator technology directly powers every quadruped in production (besides Spot) and forms the core of most humanoid robots today. He went on to contribute to the electric iteration of Boston Dynamics' Atlas and now works at PI, one of the world's leading physical AI companies.
Bayley Wang — PrismaX
Co-founder and CEO of PrismaX with over 15 years of experience in robotics and AI, including research at MIT on robotics systems, actuation, and simulation. His work focuses on how real-world robot deployment, teleoperation, and human-in-the-loop systems generate the data and operational standards needed to advance physical AI.
Keerthana Gopalakrishnan — Google DeepMind
Senior Research Engineer at Google DeepMind with a decade of experience building ML-driven robotic systems. Keerthana's work centers on scaling general-purpose intelligence in the physical world, including her contributions to the Gemini Robotics models. She is also the author of AI for Robotics.
Benjamin Bolte — OpenAI
Robotics engineer and AI researcher working on AI systems that interact with the physical world, previously at Tesla and Meta where he contributed to large-scale machine learning infrastructure for robotics and embodied AI.
Kun Peng - Stanford xBuilders
General Partner at xBuilders, investing at the cross-section of AI, fintech, and blockchain. Kun is the founder of the Stanford AI Builders and Stanford Blockchain Builders communities, and a lecturer at Stanford. He will moderate the humanoid panel, bringing a cross-disciplinary lens on how AI and physical intelligence intersect with emerging technology ecosystems.
What to Expect
This is not a typical meetup or conference session — walk in and you'll immediately know it.
Robots will be running around the room. The centerpiece of the evening is a live, side-by-side demo of the original MIT Mini Cheetah and a modern-day Unitree Go2 — a decade of progress in dynamic robotics standing right next to each other. You'll also get a first-hand look at the integrated robotics actuator that became the foundation of nearly every quadruped and humanoid robot in production today. A genuine piece of robotics history.
Beyond the hardware, expect unfiltered technical conversations with the people working on the hardest problems in physical AI — the kind of discussions that only happen when the right people are in the same room.
Come ready to geek out.
Hosted by PrismaX
PrismaX is a robotics-native service layer setting standards for how robots, data, and human work are deployed to advance intelligence for physical AI systems. Backed by partners including a16zcrypto CSX, Volt Capital, Blockchain Builders Fund, Stanford Blockchain Accelerator (SBA), and Virtuals Protocol.
Learn more: https://www.prismax.ai/