SoftBank unveils an ambitious trillion-dollar Project Crystal Land in Arizona, aiming to create an AI and robotics industrial complex in partnership with TSMC, marking a significant investment in cutting-edge technology.
Coco Robotics, a startup developing zero-emissions delivery robots, secures $80M funding led by Sam Altman and Max Altman, partners with OpenAI to leverage their technology while providing real-world data for model training, having made over 500,000 deliveries since 2020 with major retailers.
Meta introduces V-JEPA 2, an AI 'world model' designed to recognize object movements, enhancing robotics and self-driving cars by better understanding the physical world.
Chinese tech giants like Baidu, WeRide, and Pony.ai are rapidly catching up to Silicon Valley's Waymo in the global robotaxi race, leveraging China's massive market, supportive regulations, and competitive supply chains to expand services worldwide.
Hugging Face, an AI development platform, unveiled two affordable open-source humanoid robots: HopeJR, a full-size robot capable of walking and manipulating objects for around $3,000, and Reachy Mini, a desktop unit for testing AI apps costing $250-$300, furthering its push into accessible robotics.
Google showcased its Gemini AI animating Aloha 2 robots, demonstrating its integration of artificial intelligence into robotics, with the potential for teleoperation, data gathering, and affordable tabletop setups for developers.
NVIDIA unveiled groundbreaking platforms, models, and technologies like Isaac GR00T N1.5, GR00T-Dreams, Blackwell systems, Cosmos Reason, and Isaac GR00T-Mimic for advancing humanoid robot development, with major robotics companies adopting NVIDIA's solutions.
A creepy-looking AI robot nurse called Nurabot has been unveiled to tackle healthcare worker burnout by patrolling hospital halls, delivering medicine, tracking vitals, and potentially assisting with patient care tasks like lifting in the future.
Waymo achieves 10 million robotaxi rides milestone, doubling its volume in five months while delivering over 250,000 weekly paid trips across four major cities, as Tesla prepares to launch competing autonomous taxi service in Austin next month.
In this AI Minds newsletter, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains why the AI revolution is underhyped, Mark Zuckerberg discusses AGI and China's AI progress, NVIDIA's Jensen Huang unveils plans for physical AI and robotics, and insights into medical AI, vision-language models, GAN inversion, voice AI agents, and more.