On 9 September, the US physical-AI startup Harmoni closed a 10 million dollar Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with valuation undisclosed, and on the same day unveiled HAL. HAL is an AI that lives on the shop floor: a worker can ask why a machine is running slower than usual, file a repair … Read more
Wanxun, a global front-runner in flexible embodied intelligence, has released NOVA 2.0, the Neuromorphic Omniversal Versatile Architecture, which it calls the industry’s first open-world, all-weather, commercial-delivery-grade embodied intelligence architecture. It is forged from more than 10 million multi-dimensional extreme-condition operations across 40-plus real industry scenarios. Somatic intelligence against extreme conditions Embodied intelligence is moving out … Read more
Leaner architecture and faster response are the direction of travel for smart cars, and cockpit-domain convergence is one of its sharpest nodes. Zuoshi Auto Research forecasts China’s cockpit-domain fusion market will grow at a 36 per cent compound rate from 2026 to 2030, with 3.6 times the headroom still to come by the end of … Read more
A quiet migration is reshaping Chinese robotics. By one tally, nearly 40 core autonomous-driving executives and technical leads have moved into embodied AI. The names leaving Li Auto alone lost eight senior people in half a year, most to robotics. Former autonomous-driving president Lang Xianpeng founded Kunlun Robotics, raising three rounds in 90 days to … Read more
On 20 August local time, Uber said its platform had gone live in Dubai with Baidu’s Apollo Go driverless vehicles, operated by UAE firm New Horizon Luxury Transport. Riders choosing UberX or Uber Comfort can now be matched to an Apollo Go, and an ‘autonomous’ option in the app raises the odds. Service starts in … Read more
On 20 August in Shenzhen, Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei sat down with Wen Shugang, chairman of China Huaneng Group, and Zhong Guodong, the state power giant’s general manager. The meeting was framed around national strategy and the front edge of industry, but Ren used it to make a sharper point about where China’s … Read more
IJCAI-ECAI 2026 runs from 15 to 21 August in Bremen, Germany. As the comprehensive top conference in AI, IJCAI has long been the exam hall where the industry’s big labs show what they really achieved in the past year. Who made real progress on which front, which technical routes are consolidating into consensus, the papers … Read more
One of the most star-studded “fusion” papers of the year in video generation and embodied intelligence has just appeared. A few days ago, a paper titled Masked Visual Actions for Unified World Modeling landed on arXiv. It has not yet spread through the academic circuit, but it is about to blow up. The author list … Read more
On 28 July, the Cyberspace Administration of China, together with the cyberspace offices of Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Shenzhen and five leading large-model firms, launched the AI Large-Model IPv6 Capability Enhancement Initiative in Xiong’an. The goal is to push generative large-model applications to fully support IPv6, laying the network foundation for the intelligent era. As … Read more