China’s two flagship AI model startups are rebuilding themselves as token merchants. A model-industry headhunter told the Silicon Lab research desk that both Zhipu and MiniMax are hiring B2B token salespeople at home and abroad, asking for three-plus years of experience at a cloud vendor or MaaS platform, ideally with coding skills of their own. … Read more
At the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on 22 August, a humanoid robot stood on a real tennis court and returned balls travelling faster than 50 km/h, judging the landing point in milliseconds, stepping, twisting and swinging. It served, played forehands and backhands, moved its opponent around the baseline, volleyed at the net, … Read more
The world’s oldest consumer-electronics fair opened in Berlin on 4 September looking less like a gadget show and more like a parade of Chinese physical AI. Of roughly 2,000 exhibitors at IFA 2026, more than 932 came from mainland China, a number that tops 1,000 with Hong Kong and Taiwan firms included, close to half … Read more
Two weeks after debuting as the first humanoid-robot company on China’s A-share market, Unitree has lost more than RMB 230 billion of market value. By the close on 4 September its shares sat at RMB 530.30, giving a market capitalisation of RMB 214.5 billion, roughly half the RMB 444.9 billion peak reached on listing day. … Read more
On 17 August, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-27B became the most popular model on Hugging Face. The response from the global AI community was striking less for the ranking itself than for what the model represents: a 27-billion-parameter open-weights model, small enough to run on a single consumer GPU, posting coding and agent scores that sit on the … Read more
Two announcements landed within hours of each other in early September, and together they frame the next fight in AI: who defines consumer computing once models run on the desk instead of in the cloud. On 1 September Tim Cook stepped down as Apple chief executive to become executive chairman, handing the company to John … Read more
Humanoid robotics in 2026 is caught in a paradox. The hardware has raced ahead, with full-size robots landing backflips, street-dance combos and martial-arts sequences, yet the industry’s base layer has barely moved. Every maker uses its own body shape, joint configuration, sensing interface and calibration. A grasping policy trained for years on one company’s hardware … Read more
Meta launched Muse Spark 1.3 on 3 September, its fourth flagship model release in five months, and within hours the new model had leapfrogged the Gemini 3.8 Flash that Google had unveiled the same day. The duel marks the fastest cadence of frontier releases the industry has seen, with model rankings now turning over in … Read more
NEO may be the most contradictory humanoid on the planet. When 1X Technologies opened pre-orders in October 2025 at USD 20,000 a unit or USD 499 a month, the first year’s capacity sold out in five days and bookings passed 10,000. A year on, in September 2026, no unit is confirmed delivered to a ordinary … Read more
Inspire Robotics, working with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Fudan University, has open-sourced HandEdit, a dataset and benchmark for first-person human-to-robot dexterous-hand image editing. Inspire’s RH56DFX dexterous hand operating an espresso machine. (Source: OFweek Robotics) What HandEdit actually is The task: take a first-person human-operated video and replace the hand or arm with a specified … Read more