Billions of dollars are flooding into humanoid robotics as tech giants and startups race to build AI-powered machines, with experts calling it a potential platform revolution — but serious challenges around dexterity, training data, job displacement, and overhyped expectations threaten to slow the boom.
Tencent launches HY-World 2.0, a groundbreaking multi-modal AI model that generates game-ready 3D assets — including meshes and point clouds — directly from text, images, or video, with native support for Unity, Unreal Engine, and Isaac Sim, now available as open-source with 1.2 billion parameters.
Google DeepMind launches Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a major upgrade featuring enhanced spatial reasoning, multi-view understanding, and a new industrial gauge-reading capability built with Boston Dynamics — now available to developers via the Gemini API.
Amazon surges to $717 billion in revenue with AWS AI income exceeding $15 billion annually, as the tech giant unleashes a $200 billion spending spree on AI infrastructure, robotics, drone delivery, and satellite broadband, cementing its dominance across cloud, grocery, and logistics.
Thousands of gig workers in Nigeria, India, and Argentina are strapping iPhones to their foreheads to record household chores, feeding a booming data industry that trains humanoid robots for companies like Tesla — but experts and privacy advocates are sounding alarms over how this intimate footage is stored, shared, and …
AI is going deeply personal this week: Utah launches a pilot letting AI renew psychiatric prescriptions for just $19/month, OpenAI secures a record $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation, and thousands of workers worldwide are filming their daily chores to train the next generation of humanoid robots.
A groundbreaking AI system called ACRA is now autonomously reading scientific literature and translating chemical synthesis procedures into robotic lab experiments, successfully completing six real-world synthesis examples across two robotic platforms and promising to revolutionize automated chemistry research.
Uber teams up with China's Pony AI and Croatia's Verne to launch Europe's first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb, with testing already underway and plans to scale to thousands of autonomous vehicles across multiple European markets.
Charlotte robotics startup Lucid Bots raises $20M in Series B funding, bringing total investment to $34M, as its window-cleaning drones and robots surge from 100 to nearly 1,000 units sold while expanding into painting, waterproofing, and sealing markets.
Amazon's Zoox is expanding its robotaxi service to Austin and Miami, scaling its fleet to 100 vehicles, pursuing NHTSA approval for 2,500 self-driving cars, and partnering with Uber to offer commercial rides in Las Vegas this summer.