Humanoid robots, VLA models, self-driving, and embodied agents. — 7 releases covered on the show.
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'.
Follow Robotics & Embodied AI and everything else in AI — live every Thursday.
