The most valuable company in physical AI may turn out to be one that does not build robots at all. General-purpose models are now being tested as robot controllers. Recent work around GPT-6 Astra and comparable systems shows models that can interpret complex instructions, identify objects and plan the next operation, including recovering when a … Read more
An anonymous model spent ten days as the most used model on OpenRouter, and the company behind it only admitted ownership after it had already been benchmarked to death. On 17 October DeepSeek pushed out V4.1 Flash-1017, an update to the model Chinese developers call the big fat fish. Two days later MiniMax launched M3.1 … Read more
Open a cupboard, find the blocks hidden inside, then stack them into a bridge. A child manages it. For a robot the task splits into capabilities that live in different models: vision and language following to find the blocks, contact-rich interaction to open the door, geometric planning and fine control to build the span. Vision-language-action … Read more
Shenhao Technology built its business selling inspection robots to power grid operators. This month its subsidiary was named second winner on a central state-owned enterprise’s intelligent compute cluster tender, and the contract is worth more than the company’s entire annual revenue. Two orders in a matter of days total close to RMB 670 million, against … Read more
Jensen Huang walked onto the stage at the Tempodrom in Berlin on 21 October and did not announce a new chip. Vera Rubin, already public, was confirmed as being in full production. The substance of the keynote was three operational problems: how to build compute capacity faster, how to control increasingly capable agents, and how … Read more
A team led by Xu Disheng, a visiting scholar at Shanghai AI Lab and professor at Greater Bay Area University, has completed a proof of the three-dimensional Ghys conjecture, working with the lab’s Shusheng-S2 scientific multimodal model. The result has been formally verified by a Peking University team, and the paper is on arXiv with … Read more
Wherever the money is, the platforms arrive. For China’s robotics startups, they have arrived. OpenAI has been posting robotics roles at a steady clip. As of 23 October the company listed 15 positions, running from robot software and control systems through motors, actuators, PCBs, test equipment and field engineers. The salary ceiling for the robotics … Read more
DeepSeek is close to completing a new round of about RMB 100 billion, with a pre-money valuation of roughly RMB 500 billion, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Leiphone’s Leidi. DeepSeek’s new round would be the largest private AI financing in China this year (Source: Sohu Tech) The confirmation is not a … Read more
DeepSeek plans to lead a seed round in Winverse AI, a robotics AI company founded only months ago, at a post-money valuation of about $400 million, or roughly 2.7 billion yuan, Bloomberg reported on 12 October. The round itself is in the tens of millions of dollars. Meituan’s Longzhu fund has committed to follow. DeepSeek … Read more
On 20 October, DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, its self-developed inference framework, and a detail buried inside the release is reshaping how China’s AI stack talks to silicon. Both Huawei’s Ascend 950 NPU and Nvidia’s SM100 Blackwell GPU appear on the officially supported hardware list, pulled from the same code tree, and switching between the two takes … Read more