Interesting piece from an infrastructure company that's working on what they call AI's "physical world blindness."
Key insight: there are 1B+ cameras deployed globally, and vision AI costs dropped 100x in 2 years. The infrastructure to give AI real-time physical perception already exists — but nobody's built the intelligence layer yet.
Their approach: Visual Question Answering (VQA) — point any camera at anything, ask a question in plain English ("Is the parking lot full?" "Are workers wearing hard hats?"), get a structured real-time answer.
Not pre-trained object detection with fixed categories, but open-ended visual understanding in natural language.
https://iotex.io/blog/iotexs-anti-roadmap-for-2026/
What do you think — is physical-world perception the next big frontier for AI, or is this a solved problem that just needs more sensor data?
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