At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai on July 17, Shenzhen company AI Squared showcased its upgraded in-house brain-inspired large model NeuroVLA, the open-source AlphaBrain Platform, and AlphaBot 2 running the latest robot brain — demonstrating real productivity in industrial manufacturing and new retail.
Often called China’s most “Tesla-like” robotics firm, AI Squared drew a constant crowd of manufacturing customers, partners, investors and overseas guests. AlphaBot 2’s industrial solutions and live cocktail, coffee and ice-cream demos became standout attractions.
The biggest change in robotics over the past year, AI Squared argues, is not that robots look more human but that robot brains have started to truly learn, understand the world and decide autonomously. NeuroVLA — the world’s first original brain-inspired VLA model — borrows the brain’s “cortex-cerebellum-spinal cord” coordination so the robot gains three biological-motion abilities: active perception, fault self-recovery and temporal memory. Facing unknown environments, it no longer passively executes but actively understands the scene and adjusts tasks, lifting generalisation in complex settings and holding stable through long, multi-step work.
That leap shows up in industry. At WAIC, AlphaBot 2 ran a PCB load and unload demo: across trays of different sizes, colours and even transparent reflective surfaces, it recognised precisely and used dual arms to pick, transport and load and unload in one smooth flow. In 2025 AI Squared signed a three-year, 1,000-unit benchmark deal with HKC; this year it won repeat orders from multiple customers in semiconductor display — proof its industrial productivity replicates.
AI Squared’s “Aibao Smart Cube” vending robots now run routinely across more than ten provinces and cities, making hundreds of zero-error coffees, ice creams and matchas a day; the new cocktail demo extends the skill set further. During WAIC 2026 the Smart Cube moved into Zhangyuan, a century-old Shanghai landmark, as an official “WAIC City Walk” stop.
Over the past three years AI Squared has systematically innovated on the robot brain; Morgan Stanley’s recurring global robotics reports name it a representative of the “brain” direction. In April it launched AlphaBrain Platform, the world’s first out-of-the-box embodied-AI open-source community, closing the “data-training-model-evaluation” loop and opening complex R&D to the industry.
As embodied AI moves from “can it be built” to “can it scale,” AI Squared showed both China’s latest results and the new competitive axis — from hardware specs to the brain’s capacity to keep evolving.
Source: Shenzhen News (sznews.com). Translated and adapted for The Robot Belt.