Written by Jakub Rusinowski · Last updated July 21, 2026
NVIDIA's Cosmos 3 is an open, omnimodal 'World Foundation Model' for Physical AI — one system that understands and generates text, images, video, ambient audio and robot actions. Here's what a world model actually does, how its two-tower architecture 'thinks before it acts,' the Super / Nano / Edge sizes, what hardware it needs, and why NVIDIA gave it away — with infographics you can skim.
Most of the AI you read about writes text. NVIDIA Cosmos 3, launched on June 1, 2026, does something different: it learns how the physical world behaves — how objects move, fall, collide and respond — and uses that understanding to imagine what happens next and to decide what a robot or car should do. NVIDIA calls this category Physical AI, and Cosmos 3 is its open, frontier-scale foundation model. It's also the first fully open "omnimodel" that natively takes in and generates text, images, video, ambient sound and actions in a single system. Here's what that actually means, why the architectu…