Physical AI and the Future of Robotics with Sergey Arkhangelskiy of Positronic

In this episode, Nitay and Kostas sit down with Sergey Arkhangelskiy, founder of Positronic, to dig into the state of physical AI and what it will really take to bring general-purpose robotics into the real world.

Sergey shares his journey from a decade at Google Search, where he worked on ranking and helped build the "Tetris" layer that unified web, image, and map results, to co-founding Wanna (a computer vision AR company acquired by Farfetch), and most recently launching Positronik to focus on robotics and physical AI.

The conversation explores why robotics is approaching but has not yet hit its "GPT-3 moment," the data and hardware bottlenecks that make physical AI fundamentally harder than LLMs, and why measurement and evaluation matter so much. Sergey walks through Positronik's newly released Physical AI Leaderboard (fail.ai), which benchmarks open-source vision-language-action (VLA) models on real hardware using production-grade metrics like throughput (units per hour) and mean time between failures, rather than simple success rates.

They also discuss why commercial and industrial applications (manufacturing, logistics, pick-and-place) are likely to lead before household robots, the economics of automation and the "cost of intelligence," the role of human-in-the-loop systems, latency and cloud-vs-edge tradeoffs for running VLA models, and the growing importance of open source in both robotic software (ROS) and hardware (OpenArm).