Products & Apps
Physical AI Launchables
CoreWeave Physical AI Launchables: one-command robotics templates
CoreWeave launched Physical AI Launchables at GTC Berlin: one command starts a robotics template such as Isaac Sim.
Robotics & Embodied AI
Humanoid robots, VLA models, self-driving, and embodied agents. — 12 releases covered on the show.
October 2026
Acquisitions
World Labs acquisition
AMD to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for about $8.2B in stock
AMD agreed to buy World Labs for about $8.2 billion in stock; Fei-Fei Li becomes AMD's chief scientist once the deal closes, bringing world-model research in-house.
~$8.2B in AMD stock
August 2026
Products & Apps
MicroDuck robot kit
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.
$399 kit price
July 2026
New Models
FLUX 3
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.
20 sec max video-with-audio clip length77% / 93% preference wins vs Runway Gen-4.5 / Luma Ray 3.2
New ModelsOpen weights
Robostral Navigate
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.
8B ParametersSOTA R2R-CE benchmark
May 2026
New Models
Qwen 3.7-Max
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.
New Models
Perceptron Mk1
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.
January 2026
New ModelsOpen weights
Alpha Mayo
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.
November 2025
New Models
ACT-1 & Memo
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.
$200 Skill glove used for data collection vs $20K teleop rigs
Products & Apps
Iron
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.
October 2025
Products & Apps
NEO
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.
$20k price2026 delivery year
February 2025
New Models
Helix
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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