The Belt 
PaXini, the Shenzhen company that has spent the past few years trying to give machines a sense of touch, has launched PX-FOOTRIX, which it describes as the world’s first multi-dimensional tactile sensor for the sole of a robot foot. The product is built on a 6D Hall-effect tactile array that the company says is the … Read more
In real-time voice interaction, latency is the only deadline. A text answer a few hundred milliseconds late leaves the user mildly unimpressed. One audible stutter and the sense of talking to something non-human destroys trust immediately. To fix that engineering problem, OpenAI spent six months rebuilding its entire voice system. OpenAI has now published an … Read more
Su Jianlin, a Kimi researcher and the author of rotary position embeddings, has published a short paper titled Notes on the MoE and Attention of K3. It concentrates on the trade-offs Moonshot made in expert architecture, training stability, load balancing and attention design. K3 carries 2.8 trillion total parameters and 896 routed experts. The model … Read more
The Information reported this week that at a Seed all-hands two weeks ago, Zhang Yiming spoke up in a way he rarely does and ruled out using distillation to catch the frontier large language models. His position was blunt: ByteDance should be willing to sacrifice some short-term interest for the sake of the long-term goal. … Read more
Jeff Dean has left Google. The chief scientist and Google Brain co-founder ended a 27-year run on 5 August 2026, and announced that he is starting a company. Alphabet shares moved sharply on the news. Dean joined in 1999 as employee number 30. The company had 25 people then, he recalled, and more than 190,000 … Read more
China’s steel sector has been pushing into high-end precision materials this year, and a cluster of new products is quietly underwriting electronics, new energy and advanced equipment. The headline act is Cicada Wing Steel, also called 5G steel, at its thinnest just 0.07 millimetres, about the width of a hair and slimmer than a sheet … Read more
OpenRouter, the leading large-model API aggregator, is reported to be seeking a buyer and talking to several technology giants. The twist: just two months earlier it closed a 113 million dollar Series B led by Google’s CapitalG, with Nvidia, Snowflake, Databricks and ServiceNow alongside, at a 1.3 billion dollar post-money valuation, processing over 100 trillion … Read more
Amid a humanoid sector where valuations inflate faster than deployments, one American company is pitched as the most commercially successful of the bunch, and it is taking that claim to the public market. On 24 June Agility Robotics signed a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI to list on Nasdaq at a 2.5 billion dollar … Read more
On 30 July Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2, a family spanning a vision-language-action model, a reasoning model and an on-device model, and for the first time delivering whole-body control of a humanoid. Google’s play is simple to state: own the robot brain layer. In the phone era it sold few handsets but reached most … Read more
One year ago China’s dexterous-hand field was a pile of demos. Capital was thin, most makers were still validating designs, and annual output sat in the hundreds or low thousands, good for trade shows but not for factories or whole robots. That phase is over. Money moved first. Full-year dexterous-hand funding reached 16.88 billion yuan … Read more