Physical AI's Money Moment - $11B and Counting
Physical Intelligence is in talks to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, doubling in four months, as investors pour capital into AI software designed to run robots in the real world.
Robotics
Pokemon Go Built a 30 Billion Image AI Dataset
Niantic trained a visual positioning AI on 30 billion images collected from Pokemon Go players over eight years. The data now guides delivery robots with centimeter-level accuracy.
Humanoid Robots Hit Ukraine's Frontlines for First Time
Foundation Labs sent two Phantom MK-1 humanoid robots to Ukraine in February - the first deployment of armed humanoid robots to any active combat zone.
LeRobot v0.5.0: First Humanoid, 10x Training Speed
Hugging Face ships its largest LeRobot update yet: Unitree G1 humanoid support, Pi0-FAST VLA, Real-Time Chunking, 10x faster image training, and PEFT/LoRA fine-tuning for large robot policies.
Figure AI Helix 02 - Musk Asks if It's Autonomous
Figure AI's Helix 02 robot went viral cleaning a living room on March 9 - then Elon Musk publicly questioned whether the demo was really autonomous.
AMD Pushes P100 Embedded to 12 Cores and 80 TOPS
AMD expands its Ryzen AI Embedded P100 family with six new 8-to-12-core processors delivering 80 system TOPS, targeting industrial automation, robotics, and medical imaging.
Google CEO Could Earn $692M if Waymo and Wing Pay Off
Alphabet's new three-year compensation plan could pay Sundar Pichai up to $692 million - more than seven times Satya Nadella's pay - with a third of the upside tied to Waymo and Wing performance.
OpenAI's Robotics Chief Quits Over Pentagon Deal
Caitlin Kalinowski, OpenAI's head of robotics, resigns over the company's Pentagon AI contract, warning that mass surveillance and autonomous weapons 'deserved more deliberation than they got.'
Google Absorbs Its Robotics Moonshot Intrinsic - Physical AI Just Got a Corporate Home
Alphabet folds robotics software company Intrinsic into Google after five years as an independent moonshot, giving it access to Gemini models, DeepMind research, and Google Cloud - plus a Foxconn joint venture building AI-driven factories.
NVIDIA's Alpamayo Hits 100K Downloads to Become Hugging Face's Top Robotics Model
Alpamayo 1, a 10-billion-parameter vision-language-action model that explains its own driving decisions, has become the most downloaded robotics model on Hugging Face - less than two months after its CES 2026 debut.
