Once AI has learned to see, write and generate — where does it evolve next? The answer: into the real, physical world. People's Daily recently published a frontier feature, "Physical AI is accelerating into the real world," defining AI's next direction of evolution. As an industry leader, DaoAI was invited to contribute, with General Manager Zhang Yu addressing the central question of putting Physical AI to work.
Simulation is beautiful — but the real world is the answer
In the rush to develop Physical AI and embodied intelligence, "simulation training" is the dominant route: let a robot make endless mistakes inside a "digital twin," then transfer it to the real environment. The path looks perfect — but in his People's Daily interview, Zhang Yu cut to the core:
Real-world operating conditions are complex and shaped by many interacting physical factors; simulation systems cannot fully replicate physical detail — at times they only serve as a fallback when real data is missing.
Complex contact, soft-body deformation, fluid motion, uneven ground — these are physical processes a simulator struggles to cross. Simulation is valuable, but it is only the "highway" toward Physical AI, never the "final stop." An algorithm that excels in a "clean" simulated environment often fails the moment it enters a messy factory, an inspection site, or a constantly changing production line. DaoAI's technical conviction has always rested on "real physical-interaction data."
What is Physical AI? Here's how People's Daily puts it
People's Daily gives a clear definition: Physical AI is an AI agent that steps off the screen and into reality — one that, like a person, perceives its environment and "acts with its hands." It has three key traits:
- Built on real data: its capabilities rest on real physical-interaction data.
- Understands the physical world: it knows how objects move, make contact and deform, and grasps friction, gravity, spatial relationships and causal change.
- Deployable to real entities: it can predict, plan actions, and complete tasks in open environments.
Seen through the lens of technical evolution, Physical AI is the natural next direction for AI: if the first stage taught AI to "see," and the second taught it to "write," then Physical AI's task is to teach AI to "act." That is exactly what DaoAI set out to build.
DaoAI's technical foundation: from base model to applications
For the past decade, AI has lived in the digital world — chatting, drawing, writing code. Physical AI is the AI that steps off the screen, understands the real world and acts to change it — spotting defects on a factory floor, directing robots to do the work. DaoAI's core architecture is deliberately simple: one base model, DaoAI World, gives rise to two families of applications — industrial visual inspection (DaoAI AOI) and AI content creation (Wemio).
While others are still pitching concepts, we've been running on production lines for a full eight years. 1-micron precision, 3-second training, 40-millisecond inspection — that's what Physical AI looks like in practice.
Three product lines: bringing Physical AI from idea to reality
Guided by a "seek-truth, stay-practical" philosophy, DaoAI has built an end-to-end product system spanning "algorithm training — intelligent inspection — AI content creation." It already serves hundreds of companies across electronics manufacturing, automotive electronics, semiconductors, traffic surveillance, film and more.
DaoAI World: an enterprise's own Physical-AI foundation
In one line — let every company easily train its own vision AI, with no AI background, in under an hour. It is a "brain that understands the physical world": space, materials, light and shadow, how things move and why. It integrates 11 industrial-grade AI models, covering unsupervised defect segmentation, instance segmentation, object detection, OCR, hybrid models and more.
- Unsupervised learning: with a single good sample and zero defect images, the AI completes high-precision detection in 10–40 ms at over 99% accuracy.
- Step-change efficiency: smart labeling tools speed annotation 10× and cut deployment time 30×.
- Data sovereignty: fully on-premise — data never leaves the factory.
DaoAI AOI inspection agent: a "minutes, not hours" revolution
In one line — it tackles the five chronic pains of traditional AOI (3–5 hours to change over, high false calls, dependence on senior engineers, data silos, blind spots) and moves PCBA inspection from "hours" to "minutes."
- Learn only the good: legacy systems need tens of thousands of labeled images; we only learn what "normal" looks like, and still catch defects never seen before.
- Extreme precision: up to 1-micron precision — a few dozen times finer than a human hair.
- Proven with leaders: already serving Siemens, Brose, Midea, AUX, BOE and other top Chinese and international manufacturers, with internationally leading technology.
Wemio: an AI film-creation platform
Wemio is the second branch growing from DaoAI's "single tree" — content generation. The reason lies in industry itself: on a factory floor everything is bound by physics — size, light, motion — and even a small error won't do. We moved years of accumulated 3D technology and physical-constraint understanding into video generation, solving the field's hardest problem: inconsistent frames and broken physical continuity.
- One-click end-to-end: feed in a script idea, and the AI handles storyboarding, image generation, character consistency, voiceover and scoring.
- Character-consistency breakthrough: appearance and traits stay consistent across shots and scenes, curing the industry's "face-swap" plague in AI video.
- Multi-style, multilingual, batch: a five-person team can produce a 120-minute AI film in two weeks.
Generic tools make ten-second clips — stunning in isolation. Wemio's challenge is a 120-minute film: thousands of shots strung together where characters can't change faces, scenes can't fall apart, and motion must obey physics. Behind it all is, once again, that base model which understands the physical world.
The moat: a data loop with the physical world
Many peers do only algorithms or only hardware. DaoAI builds it all in-house — from sensors and 3D imaging to the world model. That yields something no one can copy: a data loop with the physical world.
Every inspection on the line, every robot grasp, flows back into DaoAI World and makes the base model smarter. This kind of feedback from the real world can't be bought — only earned over eight years, one production line at a time. Competitors can copy an algorithm; they can't copy the loop.
In closing: we only build the "hands" and "eyes" of the real world
Being spotlighted by People's Daily and invited to share is strong recognition of DaoAI's "seek-truth, stay-practical" technical path. The road map for Physical AI has not yet converged — which is precisely the time to dig in. DaoAI will keep its roots in real scenarios:
- With DaoAI World, let every company easily train its own vision AI;
- With DaoAI AOI, move PCBA inspection from "hours" to "minutes";
- With Wemio, take AI video from "one stunning clip" to "a fully controllable feature."
The virtual world has no shortage of "gods"; the real world is short of a reliable pair of hands and eyes. DaoAI walks with Physical AI.