Humanoid robots, VLA models, self-driving, and embodied agents. — 10 releases covered on the show.
Hugging Face + Pollen Robotics ship a $399 walking mini robot kit
Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics (the Reachy Mini team) announced a $399 build-it-yourself mini robot kit that walks on two legs, has skates, and carries a camera — a hobbyist-priced take on the Disney-style bipeds shown on NVIDIA GTC stages. Wolfram pre-ordered one live on the show.
FLUX 3: one model for image, 20-second video with audio, and robot action prediction
Black Forest Labs launched FLUX 3 in early access — its first model generating video, audio, and robot action-prediction from one set of weights, alongside image generation (a FLUX.3 Mimic variant was announced with it). FLUX 3 Video produces clips with native audio up to 20 seconds from text, images or footage, with continuation, keyframe transitions, multilingual dialogue and clip chaining; the same architecture is already teaching robots tasks on an Audi assembly line. BFL's own preference tests: 77% wins vs Runway Gen-4.5, 93% vs Luma Ray 3.2. Image generation and the open-weights FLUX 3 Dev come in later rollout phases.
Mistral releases Robostral Navigate, its first embodied-navigation model
An 8B robotics model that guides robots through natural-language task instructions using a single RGB camera, claiming state of the art on the R2R-CE benchmark. Mistral's first move into embodied AI, and one of the week's most-discussed releases on Hacker News.
Alibaba releases Qwen 3.7-Max agentic frontier model with robotics demos
Alibaba released Qwen 3.7-Max, an agentic frontier model built for long autonomous runs, demonstrated alongside robotics demos. It continues the Qwen Max line as Alibaba's closed frontier offering aimed at agentic workloads.
Perceptron Mk1: frontier video + embodied reasoning at 1/10th the price
Perceptron released Mk1, a frontier video and embodied reasoning model priced at roughly a tenth of comparable models. It scores 88.5 on VSI-Bench and 72.4 on RefSpatialBench (versus 9.0 for GPT-5m on the latter) and is live on OpenRouter.
NVIDIA Alpha Mayo: open source reasoning self-driving models
NVIDIA announced Alpha Mayo at CES, a family of open source reasoning-based self-driving AI models. The models perform end-to-end autonomous driving with explicit reasoning steps, like identifying jaywalkers and stopping accordingly, demoed in a Mercedes-Benz.
Sunday Robotics unveils ACT-1 home robot foundation model and Memo
Sunday Robotics introduced ACT-1, a home robot foundation model, alongside its Memo robot. Instead of $20K teleoperation rigs, training data comes from a $200 skill glove, and the model handles long-horizon household tasks with solid zero-shot generalization.
XPeng unveils 'Iron' humanoid robot with soft skin and 2026 production plan
XPeng unveiled Iron, a humanoid robot it claims has the most human-like design yet, featuring soft skin, bionic muscles, and a VLT (vision-language-task) brain. The company says it plans to put Iron into production in 2026, putting a Chinese EV maker squarely in the humanoid race.
1X opens orders for NEO, a $20k consumer home humanoid shipping in 2026
1X Technologies opened orders for NEO, billed as the first consumer humanoid robot for the home, priced at $20,000 with deliveries starting in 2026. The panel treated it as a signal that home humanoid timelines are no longer purely sci-fi, anchoring the episode's 2026 robot revolution theme.
Figure announces Helix, an on-robot VLA model enabling robot-to-robot handoffs
Humanoid robot company Figure announced Helix, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with full upper-body control that runs entirely on the robot, pairing a 7 billion parameter VLM for understanding with an 80 million parameter transformer for control. The demo showed two robots collaborating and handing objects to each other from natural language commands, a first that Alex called 'super futuristically cool'.
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