Physics Gets a Vote: Nominal Cofounders on Hardware Development in an AI World
In a Nutshell
Nominal's founders explain the hardware renaissance driven by re-industrialization, defense primes, and physical AI, where "physics gets a vote" exposes simulation-reality gaps, demanding centralized data platforms like Nominal to unify testing, manufacturing, and field ops—evolving from fragmented 2003-era practices to modern CI/CD equivalents. Key innovations include AI agents for anomaly detection, automated checklists, and projects like DARPA's CIPHER for real-time adaptive testing with digital twins, accelerating loops from design to production. Hardware firms will become physical AI companies, prioritizing data collection, rigorous testing, and agentic optimization to minimize real-world risks and unlock versatile designs.
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We're entering a period of much more hardware testing. The pendulum is swinging back as we grasp how little we understand about physical systems and our data deficiencies. It's a race to collect data and develop models. AGI designing a video game for a child might not need rigorous testing, but AGI building a physical toy would require ensuring it's not dangerous. The physical world is always different because it's where we live.
Cameron and Jason, thank you for joining. Nominal is the all-in-one data and AI platform for hardware engineering, used by companies from Anduril to the Corvette racing team in aerospace and defense, robotics, autonomy, and more. Notable stat: used by four of the top five US defense primes. Congratulations on recent achievements including the race.
America is rapidly re-industrializing. Macro tailwinds for Nominal include industrialization and hardware development with compressed timelines. People are building and fielding hardware products faster. Hardware testing plays a key role. More money is flowing into building hardware rapidly, especially in aerospace and defense. The paradigm of hardware development is shifting rapidly.
Software development evolved: companies managed versions locally, then centralized internally, then productized and outsourced like GitHub (version control system). This led to CI/CD and DevOps tools. Software testing is solved, but hundreds of thousands of hardware engineers at the frontier of software-defined hardware, autonomy, and robotics lack this. Nominal operates in that space.
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