Physical AI: Autonomous Driving and the Road to Real-World Intelligence

Autonomous driving is emerging as one of the first large-scale applications of Physical AI, bringing intelligence out of the digital world and into complex real-world environments. In this keynote, Dr. Tiancheng Lou, Founder and CTO of Pony.ai, will explore how self-driving systems are evolving from assisted capabilities to autonomous agents that can perceive, plan, act and continuously improve. Drawing on Pony.ai’s work in L4 autonomous driving, he will examine why imitation alone is not enough, how reinforcement learning and world models are enabling AI to learn what “good driving” means, and what this shift reveals about the broader path toward real-world intelligence.