Sand.ai released and open sourced MAGI-2 Preview, a 114-billion-parameter mixture of experts video model that activates about 6 billion parameters per forward pass and ranks sixth globally on image to video.
Chinese world model startups disclosed about 30 billion yuan of funding in the first half of 2026, rising above 90 billion yuan once embodied AI is included. IDEA chair scientist Zhang Lei argues most of what is being funded does not qualify.
Paul Meade, the Apple vice president who ran Vision Pro hardware engineering for seven years, is joining OpenAI’s hardware team after a reorganisation left him reporting a layer further down.
Etched has raised 800 million dollars at a 5 billion dollar valuation with backing from TSMC, Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li, plus a 1 billion dollar pre-production order for a chip that runs nothing but Transformers.
China’s planning agency confirmed that eight of every ten humanoid and quadruped robots sold globally are made in China. Unitree filed for a domestic listing on first-half revenue of more than 1.05 billion yuan.
A UC San Diego team teleoperated a Unitree G1 humanoid through laparoscopic gallbladder removal on two live pigs. Nature published it in July 2026. Surgeons scored clinical readiness at 2.5 out of 5.
Tesla, Figure, Boston Dynamics, Agility, Apptronik and 1X now cover the full American humanoid stack. A Chinese industry review sorts them into three routes and shows which one is already earning revenue.
In 2025, Hello (the ride-hailing and bike-sharing platform) formed Zaofu Intelligent with Ant Group and CATL and entered robotaxis with an ambitious target: deploy 10,000 robotaxis by 2027. By then, Pony.ai had already reached single-city profitability, WeRide and Apollo Go were expanding abroad, and Waymo was still growing its fleet. A 2025 entrant looked late. … Read more
FAW Jiefang’s J6E large-customer custom edition has begun rolling off the line and into delivery. The strategic model, already well regarded in express-delivery fleets, was tailored to the pain points of leading logistics operators, and its headline feature is a Level 2-plus trunk combined assisted-driving system fromZhitu Technology. FAW Jiefang J6E large-customer custom edition at … Read more
Sales, brand and channel rankings in pool robots are settling fast, but the real technical watershed has barely arrived. Wireless models lowered the barrier to entry and unlocked Amazon, big-box and specialist channels. Early movers built shelf and brand advantages. Latecomers now face not just a product gap but a long channel-validation cycle. Wave Future’s … Read more