Applied Intuition CEO Qasar Younis: Robotaxis Will Be Routine in 200 US Cities by 2030 In 25 years, when historians tally the winners of the intelligence revolution, the companies that embedded AI into the physical world may dwarf the ones that kept it confined to screens. That is the bet Qasar Younis is making with Applied Intuition, the decade-old autonomy company he co-founded and now runs. Speaking alongside CTO Peter Ludwig on The a16z Show, Younis delivered a prediction calibrated to make any digital-first investor pause: "When we look back 25 years in this intelligence revolution, the companies that impact the physical world might actually be bigger than the companies that impact the digital world." He is not talking about chatbots. He is talking about trucks that drive themselves across interstate highways, mining equipment that operates where humans die at eight times the average workplace fatality rate, and tractors that harvest fields abandoned by a generation that doesn't want to farm. The technology, he argues, is mostly solved. What remains is engineering the cost out of the system — and selling it to industries desperate enough to say, in Ludwig's words, "we'll give you everything if you can do this." The Physical AI Thesis: Software That Touches Things Younis draws a clean line between two categories of intelligence. Digital AI optimizes ads, generates text, and produces video. Physical AI puts decision-making onto machines that operate in the real world: cars, trucks, forklifts, harvesters, bulldozers, drones, and ships. The global economy, he points out, runs on physical flows — food, energy, materials, goods, and people. The internet's most transformative companies were the ones that bridged the gap between screens and atoms: Amazon with logistics, Apple with hardware. He expects the AI era to follow the same pattern, except the physical side