The Physical World Can’t Move at AI Speed | Peri Muttath (SouthUp)

<p>What happens when AI allows a small team to build in months what once took years, but the product still has to exist in the physical world?</p><p>I’ve been trying to get Peri Muttath into the studio for almost a year. Every time I was in Israel, he seemed to be somewhere else. Every time he was available, I was abroad. We finally made it happen.</p><p>Peri has watched the technology industry evolve from many different seats. After years working across Israel’s innovation ecosystem, including the Israel Innovation Authority, he chose his next chapter at SouthUp: helping build new technology companies in the area near the Gaza border and contributing to the next generation of Physical AI and defense tech coming from there.</p><p>Our conversation went much further than startups.</p><p>We talked about <strong>why geography still matters when building physical technology</strong>, what the Russia-Ukraine war changed in the way defense technology develops, and <strong>how different this moment feels from the 1990s, when sometimes Hollywood seemed to imagine future technology faster than industry could build it</strong>.</p><p>We talked about <strong>humanoid robots entering our homes and others entering our workplaces</strong>. About which jobs machines may actually take. About AI giving small companies an opportunity to challenge incumbents with resources they could never have matched before.</p><p>But there is a catch.</p><p>Software can be updated tonight. A robot deployed thousands of kilometers away cannot.</p><p>Hardware still needs to be manufactured, shipped, tested, maintained and eventually replaced. And as everything around it accelerates, that physical reality may become one of the biggest challenges and opportunities, of the Physical AI era.</p><p>A conversation about technology, geography, robots, war, entrepreneurship and why this might be one of the most interesting moments in decades to build something physical.</p>