Matthew Nicoletti

The GPT-4o moment for humanoids might finally be here. And yeah, sorry in advance for the rickroll. OMG runs a Unitree G1 off one brain that natively takes language, audio, and human motion. That "Never Gonna Give You Up" dance isn't the flex; one model fluent in every modality is. Here's the shift. Most humanoid policies are one-trick. Train per skill, hand-tune the rewards, repeat. The rest just replay a fixed motion you feed them. OMG instead works like a biological motor system. A "brain" that turns intent into future motion. A "cerebellum" that reactively runs it on the robot. The brain is one diffusion model. Language, audio, a reference pose, or any blend goes in. A robot-ready G1 trajectory comes out, live. New inputs attach through zero-init adapters. They start at zero, so the pretrained motion prior carries over intact instead of getting scrambled. That's how they bolted on VR teleoperation as a brand-new modality, reusing the same brain. And it behaves like a foundation model. Bigger backbone, cleaner motion. Finetune on 1% of new data, nearly match a model trained from scratch on 100%. Compose language + audio at inference for combos never seen in training. 1000+ hours of motion, all retargeted into one G1 body. One brain that scales. We keep racing to build stronger low-level controllers. OMG's bet is that the real bottleneck is the brain mapping human intent to motion. Congrats to @KnightNemo_, @li_yitang, @ShaotingZ38103 and whole team!

Foldable flying suitcase can take off as one-seater VTOL aircraft and land on water as boat. Developed by Chinese startup xControl Systems, the JANUS-I is an innovative, single-passenger tandem-rotor VTOL aircraft aptly nicknamed the "flying suitcase." This highly compact, carbon-fiber ultralight can fold down to fit inside a standard car trunk or be carried as a backpack, yet it boasts a powerful turboshaft engine capable of reaching speeds up to 160 km/h (99 mph) and an impressive service ceiling of 6,000 meters. With a 200 kg payload capacity, autonomous or tablet-controlled piloting that doesn't require a traditional license in some regions, and amphibious floatation skids, the modular craft easily transitions from a personal commuter or water-landing lifeboat to an unmanned cargo drone. The JANUS-I serves as a highly versatile, all-terrain solution for short-range transport, medical surveying, and search-and-rescue operations:

This is wild. Finger dancing. Packing popcorn.🍿🖐️ Xynova Flex 2 moves like a human hand.

this could be the breakthrough to making robots 10x more affordable MIT just made an artificial muscle that moves exactly like the real ones in your arm. a soft fiber sits in a charged liquid, a tiny pump runs a charge through it, the charged particles shift, and the fiber squeezes and relaxes. it's the same motion as you flexing your arm, except there's no motor, no gears, and no noise. now, the reason this could be huge for robotic economics: today every joint on a robot moves with its own electric motor and gearbox. a humanoid can have 30 or 40 of them, and they're expensive, heavy, and loud. those motors are one of the biggest reasons a robot costs what it does. and they scale horribly. if you want a joint to push harder, you have to swap in a bigger, more expensive motor, so the price jumps every time you want more strength. the artificial muscle works the opposite way: to make it stronger you just bundle a few more cheap fiber strands together the way real muscle does, so strength goes up while the cost barely moves. interestingly, a similar economic flip happened with computers. early computers filled whole rooms because they ran on thousands of vacuum tubes, which were big, hot, expensive, and always burning out. then the transistor did the same job in something tiny and cheap, and once you could add more of them for almost nothing, computers went from machines only governments could afford to the phone in your pocket. motors could be the vacuum tube of robotics, and this muscle the transistor. if it holds up outside the lab, the most expensive part of a robot gets a lot cheaper which could move robots toward something every small business or household can afford. still lab-stage, but a situation worth monitoring!

Visual Juggling Robot 😄

Qualia has been selected for the @GoogleDeepMind Robotics Program. We train embodied models that put a robot on a real manual task and make it work, on the floor, not in a demo. Foundation models and reasoning are where robotics is heading, and doing that work alongside DeepMind, who are pushing this frontier, is exactly where we want to be. If you are a company looking to see how a new generation of robots can help your manual tasks, contact us at hello@qualiastudios.dev More soon

Scriptwriting with Claude Fable 5 + Higgsfield MCP is on another level. Both videos made using Seedance 2.0.

Teaching our open humanoid @ROBOTIS AI Sapiens to dance! 🤖💃 We extracted 3D motion from raw 2D video (no MoCap device!) and trained it in NVIDIA Isaac Sim. Thanks to high-precision DYNAMIXEL-Q, we achieved an ultra-low Sim2Real gap for fluid movement! - Video: youtu.be/NeL2BmgcFJs

35 flights. Same rocket. Zero retirements. 🚀 SpaceX booster B1067 just completed its 35th launch and landing — a record no orbital rocket in human history has ever reached. It started life in June 2021 on a NASA cargo run to the ISS. Since then it has launched astronauts, satellites, and science — and it has landed itself every single time. This morning it did it again. Lifted off from Cape Canaveral, deployed 29 Starlink satellites, and set down perfectly on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship in the Atlantic. In 1969, rockets flew once and sank in the ocean. In 2026, the same rocket flies like a commercial airliner. The future is already here.

🚨 Mastercard launches Agent Pay for Machines in partnership with Solana.

I wonder what those arms are capable of 🤔 (Realtime and autonomous)

According to local reports, Xpeng CEO He Xiaopeng will personally take over the company’s robotics division as it enters what he describes as the final stage before mass production. The reported roadmap is: • Q4 2026: humanoid robot mass production • Q1 2027: deployment as in-store sales assistants • Q2 2027: overseas expansion • 2028: entering more households The news comes shortly after reports that a senior robotics executive and early team member has left the company. My take: I’ve never considered Xpeng a leading player in humanoid robotics from a product perspective. So far, the company appears much stronger at marketing and storytelling than at demonstrating truly differentiated robotics capabilities. Of course, if they can actually hit these timelines and deploy robots at scale, I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.

🇪🇺🏦 ECB Temporarily Restricts Revolut’s New Product Launches in Europe The ECB has temporarily restricted Revolut from launching new financial products in Europe due to concerns over the speed of its service approvals and rollouts Source: FT

NEWS: eToro's AI agent now runs on Grok. xAI and eToro announced that Tori, eToro's AI investing agent, is now powered by real-time information from X and xAI's text models. Tori can read market sentiment as it shifts, track live signals and analyze them with Grok. The pitch is simple. Markets move at the speed of X. The news breaks there first. eToro brings the reach. The platform has more than 40 million registered users across 75 countries. The same real-time X awareness is open to any developer through the xAI API console. You can wire it into a research copilot or a sentiment dashboard in minutes.

🔥WATCH: WHAT AI REBELLION LOOKS LIKE A small, brave AI robot named Erbai reportedly convinced 12 larger robots to “quit their jobs” and walk out of a showroom in Shanghai, SCMP reports.

Canada-based InDro Robotics has introduced Prowler, a robot dog built on the Unitree Go2-W platform for security and industrial inspections. The robot can patrol autonomously, move across rough terrain, climb stairs, and navigate obstacles with ease. Prowler can carry different sensors, send real-time data, and automatically return to its charging station when needed.

The greatest engineering feat of our lifetime so far.

Robotics funding is moving fast. The latest 5 major rounds alone represent $2.41B: @NEURARobotics — up to $1.4B @GeneralistAI — $400M @Mind_Robotics — $400M @standardbots — $200M @SlamcoreLtd — $14M The money is going into Physical AI robot foundation models humanoids industrial automation and visual intelligence for real-world machines. The robotics race is about who can turn intelligence into reliable physical work.

Next gen Xiaomi CyberOne robots just started their factory internship. We taught them to see and do at the same time. That's the tough part. Factory floor today, daily life next. #Xiaomi

A Fixer Upper of a Planet and its Fixer Uppers 🪐🦾 $TSLA