Joel Pennington

Joel Pennington is a product manager at NVIDIA, leading initiatives in physical AI development through the NVIDIA Cosmos platform, where he drives Cosmos Reason—a multimodal reasoning model enabling embodied AI systems to understand physical common sense and generate chain-of-thought decisions for robotics and autonomous vehicles. Additionally, Joel oversees Cosmos post-training frameworks, AI watermarking integration using Google DeepMind’s SynthID to ensure synthetic data authenticity, and manages NVIDIA NIM microservices for scalable deployment of Cosmos world foundation models across cloud and edge environments. Drawing from his background in feature film VFX (Disney, Avatar sequels at Autodesk), AAA game development (Electronic Arts), and most recently operating a SaaS company delivering real-time 3D analytics for heavy industries, Joel bridges spatial computing and generative AI to advance physical AI, enabling robots and autonomous systems to perceive, reason, and interact with real-world physics at scale.