The Morning Download: The ‘ChatGPT Moment’ for Robots May Be At Hand

Good morning. Germany’s Neura Robotics said it secured up to $1.4 billion in funding to build a physical artificial intelligence platform, the latest signal that the next wave of AI is drawing closer.

The funding is backed by Amazon, Nvidia and the European Investment Bank, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The company said Wednesday that it plans to scale production to several million robots by 2030 as demand for physical AI expands across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and consumer applications.

Neura reports an order backlog exceeding $1 billion.

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang has predicted that robotics and physical AI will constitute a massive market. Speaking at the CES conference in Las Vegas in January 2025, Huang discussed “physical AI” tools that he said would help robots learn using simulated environments that closely mimic the real world.

“The ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner,” he said last year at CES.

An August 2025 blog post from Nvidia, citing Goldman Sachs, said “the global market for humanoid robots is expected to reach $38 billion by 2035, a more than sixfold increase from the roughly $6 billion for the period forecast nearly two years ago.”

A boost for European tech. Neura founder and chief executive David Reger told the FT on Wednesday that the company’s aim was to develop industrial AI applications “out of Europe for the world” and that “this is the last chance for Europe to actually ever produce again in the world . . . if we own the physical AI stack and the robotics stack.”

Nvidia is developing an AI healthcare model with startup Abridge. Nvidia is joining with Abridge, maker of an AI note-taking app for doctors, to train an AI model tailored for clinical conversations. 

The model will be trained using Nvidia’s suite of open models, called Nemotron, Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, tells the WSJ Leadership Institute's Belle Lin.

“There’s an opportunity now to take these models and adapt them with this clinical intelligence at a much earlier stage of model development,” she said.

The move comes as tech giants and AI labs alike have been ramping up their investments in the healthcare and AI industry.

As part of their joint work, Abridge will use its de-identified clinical data to further train and customize the Nemotron models, said Dr. Shiv Rao, the startup’s co-founder and chief executive.

“Generic models are powerful, but clinical intelligence—it still has to be trained, it has to be shaped, and it has to be evaluated against real-world conditions. That’s a lot of our early experiments and work with the Nemotron team,” Rao said.

CEOs say AI is too big to leave to IT. Ask a roomful of CEOs which companies are best positioned to make AI work and the answer is surprisingly consistent: the ones where the CEO is leading from the front.

That was among several views on AI shared by business leaders during day two of the WSJ Leadership Institute’s CEO Council Summit in London, which concluded yesterday.

While Shell has been leveraging AI for years, using it to manage complex geophysics data and proactively monitor critical physical assets, the technology more recently has found its way across all functions, said CEO Wael Sawan.

“It is becoming part and parcel of the way we do business,” Sawan said, adding that AI-powered transformation is too big to sit with just IT: “We want that match of our business with IT coming together to be able to unlock the potential of what it offers.”

Echoing Sawan, Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and CEO of 01.A1, said AI implementation is more than a routine IT department task, warning that leaders must deeply embed themselves into the tools.

"Too many people delegate to the CIO… And many CEOs think, ‘I don't understand. I'm not a user,” he said. “You need to become the AI user yourself.”

• OpenAI is considering significant price cuts for its AI tokens to compete with Anthropic, which has surged ahead in enterprise revenue. The WSJ reports that a potential price war between the two companies could further erode margins ahead of their anticipated IPOs.

• Oracle beat revenue and profit expectations but its shares fell in premarket trading after reporting capital expenditures for its latest fiscal year above analyst estimates, the WSJ reports. The company reported a fourth-quarter profit of $4.3 billion and a 47% increase in cloud revenue to $9.9 billion, reflecting strong demand for AI computing workloads.

• Anthropic is facing backlash concerning its new Claude Fable 5 model after users discovered it was downgrading responses on sensitive topics, including basic science questions, without notification, WSJ reports. The company said it is now working to reduce unnecessary obstructions.

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Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute's new Executive Resilience series, where she's profiling America's top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

Follow Belle Lin on LinkedIn and X for her latest reporting on enterprise technology and AI.

Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Tom Loftus is the editor of The Morning Download. He suggests following Isabelle, Belle and Steve on their various social channels. But if you insist, here's his LinkedIn.