Mike Kalil
@mikekalilmfg • 3,431 subscribers
Covering the rise of the machines without an agenda. I interviewed presidential candidates in a past life but robots interest me more today.
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Figure AI CEO on "Firing" OpenAI: "We just got like no value out of the whole relationship." Figure founder Brett Adcock brought a Figure 03 to Shawn Ryan's podcast, where he went into detail about the startup's early relationship with OpenAI that dissolved a year after it started. Adcock, who previously founded Archer Aviation, said the arrangement was useful for fundraising at first but not much else. "We just found that the team we had internally. We just ran like kind of circles around them like every day," he said. The breaking point came when he learned that OpenAI planned to restart its robotics program. That meant Figure's engineers would essentially be teaching a competitor. “We’re like teaching you how to do robot learning… you’re seeing our progress," he said. "There’s no way we’re going to teach you how to do this stuff anymore.” It was Adcock's first appearance for a podcaster who's not a Figure AI investor since the split. It was recorded around the time First Lady Melania Trump welcomed the $39 billion startup's third-generation robot, the Figure 03, at the White House for a summit on technology and education. Figure AI has developed its own vision-language-action model called Helix.
Mike Kalil194,123 次观看 • 3 个月前
Shanghai-based iSAGE is teasing what it calls the world’s first “spatial heterogenous” six-armed humanoid robot. The Hexa-Arm Robot is designed for crowded factory workstations where several tasks must be completed quickly and precisely. Each of its arms can reportedly operate in its own area on different jobs. The system has 120 moving joints, force control on every arm, and advanced cameras for assembly tasks.
Mike Kalil15,041 次观看 • 26 天前
Vietnam’s most advanced humanoid robot shows off its newly enhanced bipedal locomotion in new footage shared by VinMotion. The subsidiary of VinGroup, Vietnam’s largest conglomerate, emerged in June 2025 with its first bipedal humanoid robot, the Motion1. VinMotion says it designed the humanoid to fit into existing workflows, starting with light-duty industrial tasks like material transport, visual inspections, and basic assembly support on factory floors. The project was backed by $39 million in initial funding.
Mike Kalil31,750 次观看 • 2 个月前
Budapest-based Allonic just raised $7.2 million to develop its so-called 3D tissue braiding system designed to replace traditional robot assembly. The pre-seed funding round, reportedly the largest in Hungary’s history, was led by Visionaries Club, a European early-stage investor group, with other participants including Day One Capital, Prototype, SDAC Ventures, TinyVC, and angel investors affiliated with OpenAI and Hugging Face.
Mike Kalil15,140 次观看 • 5 个月前
A truly staggering number of AI-powered humanoid robots are emerging from Shenzhen, the booming Chinese tech hub. Shenzhen Dobot, which rose from a Kickstarter campaign to become an industrial automation leader, says its first humanoid robot, Atom, has entered mass production. Atom is positioned as a general-purpose cross-industry worker. Priced around $27,000, Atom boasts fine motor control that’s precise enough to pick up a cherry by the stem. Another major player is Pudu Robotics, which recently shipped its 100,000th service robot. Pudu is commercializing its wheeled and bipedal humanoids using its sizable customer base. Its flagship is the PUDU D9, a full-sized biped built to serve in places like warehouses, stores, and hotels. It sells for between $20,000 and $30,000. A newer firm, AI Squared, recently closed a funding round worth hundreds of millions of yuan to rush its Alpha Bot 2 general-purpose humanoid to market. The startup, founded in 2023, says its AI combines slow reasoning and fast motion planning so its robots can plan, talk, and move simultaneously. An even newer firm, Lumos Robotics, has reportedly raised nearly $28 million in angel funding to develop a full-stack humanoid robotics platform. The second-generation iteration of its flagship robot, the LUS 2, recently demonstrated the ability to get up from the ground in just a second. According to Lumos, the next-gen bot features upgraded actuators and sensors for athletic-level dexterity. LimX Dynamics, known for its agile quadrupeds and bipeds, just shared footage showcasing its CL-3 humanoid’s lifelike walking gait and gestures. LimX says its flagship humanoid can watch human movement videos and replicate them via motion conversion, with no hand coding required. Just a year after its establishment, the startup DIGIT has unveiled multiple lines of sci-fi-inspired humanoids. Its Starwalker robots switch between legged and wheeled locomotion to cover more than 10,000 square meters across multiple floors. They’re available in five different colors. DIGIT also has a robot named Xia Lan with a humanlike face that can show a range of expressions and emotions. The leading Chinese robotics firm UBTECH also recently introduced its first hyper-realistic humanoid robot, Una, intended for applications like customer service and event marketing. UBTECH says it’s begun mass-producing its Walker S humanoid robots that are reportedly helping assemble iPhones for Foxconn. Footage of a so-called intelligent swarm of these humanoids at a Zeekr factory shocked the world. Another EV maker, Xpeng, plans to start mass-producing its Iron humanoids in 2026. The robot reportedly stole the show during the 2025 Shanghai Auto Week. The Shenzhen firm that’s gotten the most attention outside the usual tech echo chambers is Engine AI, which is planning the world’s first full-sized humanoid robot boxing tournament.
Mike Kalil11,408 次观看 • 1 年前
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