Since the start of the year, China’s humanoid robots have made waves at home and abroad — from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to China’s Lunar New Year Spring Gala — fueling bold claims about a new industrial revolution that would make it impossible for the U.S. to catch up.
Chinese companies now dominate the humanoid robot market, capturing over 90% of global sales with thousands of units shipped last year. While Elon Musk maintains that Tesla will ultimately lead the industry, he recently acknowledged Chinese firms as his primary competition and noted that Tesla’s Optimus robots won’t be ready for launch until at least next year.
To unpack the claims and look beyond the viral robot performances, Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at tech consulting company Omdia and the author of its latest humanoid robotics report, spoke to Rest of World at a virtual event on February 25. — Read More
Tag Archives: Robotics
World’s first ‘biomimetic AI robot’ debuts in Shanghai
1X unveils 1XWM world model for NEO robot platform
1X Technologies has announced the integration of its new video-pretrained world model, 1XWM, into its NEO robot platform. This development targets robotics researchers, developers, and early adopters interested in advanced home robots that navigate and act with human-like understanding. The initial release is for a limited group, primarily for research and internal evaluation, with broader commercial deployment expected following further validation.
he 1XWM model represents a technical shift from conventional vision-language-action (VLA) models by using internet-scale video pretraining combined with egocentric human and robot data. This model predicts robot actions by generating text-conditioned video rollouts, which are then translated into motion commands through an Inverse Dynamics Model. Unlike prior approaches, this method does not require tens of thousands of robot demonstration hours, enabling faster adaptation to new tasks. — Read More
Android Dreams
“The danger is never that robots disobey, but that they obey perfectly.”
At the convergence of frontier research breakthroughs, billions in capital, and rising geopolitical tensions lies a dream for a new physical world. After the LLM wave, robotics is seen as the next exponential growth domain.0Chinese manufacturing is viewed as an existential threat to the US, adding to incentives. And, though robotics is the hardest domain of AI1, multiple new AI strategies now offer clear paths to Embodied General Intelligence (EGI).2
Informed by conversations with frontier researchers, intuitions gained at Optimus and Dyna2.5, and my own syntheses, I predict inference-controlled robots will comprise half the world’s GDP by 2045. This scenario illustrates how. — Read More
Figure AI’s New Humanoid Robot Can Fold Your Clothes, Do the Dishes
The day that humanoid robots wash the dishes and do the laundry may be closer than you think. On Thursday, Figure AI introduced its next-generation robot, Figure 03, taking its technology beyond factory floors to the home.
“Figure 03 is a general-purpose humanoid robot for every day,” the California startup said. In a video, it showed off the new model performing a wide range of chores at home, including watering plants, serving food, folding clothes, and tidying up a room. — Read More
There Are More Robots Working in China Than the Rest of the World Combined
China is making and installing factory robots at a far greater pace than any other country, with the United States a distant third, further strengthening China’s already dominant global role in manufacturing.
There were more than two million robots working in Chinese factories last year, according to a report released Thursday by the International Federation of Robotics, a nonprofit trade group for makers of industrial robots. Factories in China installed nearly 300,000 new robots last year, more than the rest of the world combined, the report found. American factories installed 34,000. — Read More
The Dead Internet Theory: A Survey on Artificial Interactions and the Future of Social Media
The Dead Internet Theory (DIT) suggests that much of today’s internet, particularly social media, is dominated by non-human activity, AI-generated content, and corporate agendas, leading to a decline in authentic human interaction. This study explores the origins, core claims, and implications of DIT, emphasizing its relevance in the context of social media platforms. The theory emerged as a response to the perceived homogenization of online spaces, highlighting issues like the proliferation of bots, algorithmically generated content, and the prioritization of engagement metrics over genuine user interaction. AI technologies play a central role in this phenomenon, as social media platforms increasingly use algorithms and machine learning to curate content, drive engagement, and maximize advertising revenue. While these tools enhance scalability and personalization, they also prioritize virality and consumption over authentic communication, contributing to the erosion of trust, the loss of content diversity, and a dehumanized internet experience. This study redefines DIT in the context of social media, proposing that the commodification of content consumption for revenue has taken precedence over meaningful human connectivity. By focusing on engagement metrics, platforms foster a sense of artificiality and disconnection, underscoring the need for human-centric approaches to revive authentic online interaction and community building. — Read More
China unveils bionic antelope robot to observe endangered Tibetan species
A lifelike robotic Tibetan antelope is now roaming the high-altitude wilderness of Hoh Xil National Nature Reserve in Northwest China’s Qinghai Province.
Equipped with 5G ultra-low latency networks and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, the bionic robot is being used to collect real-time data on Tibetan antelope populations without disturbing them.
This is the first time such a robotic antelope has been deployed in the heart of Hoh Xil, which sits more than 15,092 feet (4,600 meters) above sea level. — Read More
Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible
Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance on a range of robotic tasks. These models rely on multimodal inputs, with language instructions playing a crucial role — not only in predicting actions, but also in robustly interpreting user intent, even when the requests are impossible to fulfill. In this work, we investigate how VLAs can recognize, interpret, and respond to false-premise instructions: natural language commands that reference objects or conditions absent from the environment. We propose Instruct-Verify-and-Act (IVA), a unified framework that (i) detects when an instruction cannot be executed due to a false premise, (ii) engages in language-based clarification or correction, and (iii) grounds plausible alternatives in perception and action. Towards this end, we construct a large-scale instruction tuning setup with structured language prompts and train a VLA model capable of handling both accurate and erroneous requests. Our approach leverages a contextually augmented, semi-synthetic dataset containing paired positive and false-premise instructions, enabling robust detection and natural language correction. Our experiments show that IVA improves false premise detection accuracy by 97.56% over baselines, while increasing successful responses in false-premise scenarios by 50.78%. — Read More
Robotic neck incision replaces heart valve with no chest opening in world first
In a surgical first, doctors have replaced a heart valve through a small neck incision using robotic assistance, avoiding the need to open the chest.
The pioneering procedure, performed at the Cleveland Clinic by cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Marijan Koprivanac, marks the first known clinical use of transcervical robotic access for aortic valve replacement (AVR).
Four patients underwent the technique earlier this year and were discharged within days. — Read More
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