Will is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University working on AI research. He lives in San Francisco developing new tools for model infrastructure with a focus on embodied AI at South Park Commons. Previously, he founded Codesmith, which teaches ML/AI/CS/Robotics and now has 5,000 active engineering alumni globally. His academic work was at Oxford and Harvard. He is an avid lego builder and older brother to four amazing sisters
For the last decade, software engineers have owned the digital realm - scaling systems to billions. Then in three short years, a revolution in reasoning has fundamentally rewritten how we build and interact with code. But another revolution is already on the horizon.
This new wave is moving intelligence beyond the browser and the terminal. It is opening up entirely new platforms: the physical world, biology, material science, and autonomous infrastructure. We are shifting from LLMs to foundation models for the physical world. Over the next few years, we are moving toward a world where robotic arms, autonomous factories, healthcare systems, and entire production cycles can be controlled by unified AI that reasons across vision, language, and motor control.
The convergence of AI and code is dissolving the old Information Technology, putting software engineers squarely at the center of the next industrial revolution. The skills you already have - systems thinking, APIs, simulation, and scalable deployment - are exactly what’s needed to build experimental domestic agentic robots, design Sim2Real pipelines and architect robotic factories.
While the current wave of AI agents is successfully transforming how we manage digital tasks like code reviews, these agents remain fundamentally constrained by the boundaries of the digital world. The physical world presents a massive, unsolved frontier of complexity and software is emerging as the primary answer to these challenges.
Searching for speaker images...