The Belt 
Three companies that supply parts to Chinese robot makers closed funding this year, and all three founders were taught by the same man. Liu Chunbao, a professor at Jilin University’s School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has sent his students into joints, hands and faces, the three components that decide what a humanoid can actually … Read more
Apple Intelligence is live in China, two years after it first shipped outside it. The build is available now through the iOS 27.3 beta, switched on in settings under Apple Intelligence and Siri, with the general release arriving in December to every iPhone in the country. The architecture is a hybrid, and the Chinese half … Read more
Daxiao Robotics has completed adaptation, tuning and deployment validation of its Kairos 3.1 world model on Hygon’s Shenzuan-3 DCU accelerator and C86 CPU, closing the deployment path for the model on a fully domestic compute stack. The performance figure is the one that matters. In a 480P text-to-video inference task, a single Shenzuan-3 card completed … Read more
Guangzhou used the opening of its 12th International Investment Annual Conference on 4 November to put a number on its robotics ambitions. The city has established two funds of RMB 20 billion each, one for industrial development and one for science and technology innovation, for RMB 40 billion combined. The money is not a robot … Read more
Kepler has rebuilt its humanoid development around Nvidia’s physical AI stack, combining the chipmaker’s simulation, foundation model and world model tools with its own industrial hardware, plant data and embodied models. The significance is less about a single vendor deal than about where the training loop now sits. Kepler is an industrial humanoid maker selling … Read more
SYNCERE raised USD 11 million in pre-seed funding on 3 November, led by a16z Speedrun with Draper Associates, Physical World, Sequel and SeaX Ventures participating. The company is based in Palo Alto, is less than a year old, and employs a single digit number of people. The thing it is shipping looks like a floor … Read more
The demonstration is small and the implication is not. A general model that was never trained for robotics picked up a robot arm costing a few hundred dollars, held a brush, and drew the Golden Gate Bridge on paper. The first attempt was crooked. By the fourth, the outline and detail were legible. The video … Read more
Why would a company with quarterly revenue above USD 120 billion pay people to leave? That is the question Alphabet is answering in public, one country at a time. On 4 November Reuters reported that Google has extended its voluntary exit programme to Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland this year. Eligible staff can apply … Read more
Qualcomm closed fiscal 2026 with a shape that would have been unthinkable three years ago. Full year net income reached USD 13.628 billion, up 146 per cent, while the chip business that pays for everything else shrank. The quarter explains the trade. Revenue for the three months to September came in at USD 10.322 billion, … Read more
A single post on X on 4 November claimed the Anthropic listing had been cancelled. It had not been. The prospectus is still sitting in the SEC’s public archive, and the roadshow is still pencilled in for the week of 9 November. The correction arrived within hours. The repricing did not go away with it. … Read more