Humanoid robots continue to evolve.
I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird. | WSJ
The 1X Neo is one of the first humanoid robots built for your home and is equipped with full AI software. For $20,000, you can pre-order X1’s Neo now with delivery set for 2026. But a company representative might need to peer into your home, via Neo’s camera eyes, to help get things done.
WSJ’s Joanna Stern spent time with it—and its creator—to see what it can really do and how much it still requires a human operator’s help.
Drones: Why Ukraine is Just the Start
From frozen fields to fibre-optic killers—Ukraine’s drone war rewrites combat. Kamikaze quadcopters, AI pilots, and anti-drone swords are here. This is the world’s first true drone war, and it’s just beginning.
The Lie So Dangerous Tesla Engineers Are Quitting
After hundreds of crashes and major lawsuits, Tesla’s misleading “autonomous driving” claims might be coming to an end.
Elon Musk and Tesla have promised full self-driving cars, but they haven’t delivered.
Now they might have to fully retract the claim and face consequences.
Research Advances in AI-Assisted Material Generation for Physical AI
Digital twins are vital for the training and testing of physical AI that can understand and perform complex actions in the real world. But building digital twins is slow and tedious. NVIDIA’s latest generative AI and rendering research showcases the potential to dramatically accelerate and scale these workflows.
These breakthroughs combine NVIDIA Cosmos World Foundation Models and advanced rendering technologies to allow developers to pair AI assistants with experts at the heart of digital twin and physical AI development. In these future workflows, experts will engage with AI assistants using simple language to quickly generate realistic, physically accurate base materials for 3D models. They can then fine-tune generated materials, adjusting properties such as roughness and texture to better reflect the real world.
This research, along with the workflows it enables, showcases the potential to quickly transform 3D models into large-scale, simulation-ready digital twins that can be used to train safe and efficient physical AI.
China’s Dark Factories: So Automated, They Don’t Need Lights | WSJ
Ford’s CEO says China’s EV industry poses an existential threat to global automakers. The country’s dark factories, which have robots run 24/7 with limited human interaction, aim to further widen the gap between Chinese car manufacturers and everyone else. As China grapples with overproduction and Trump’s trade war with Beijing continues, one big question remains: who will buy all these vehicles?
Amazon’s big bet on ‘physical AI’
CNBC’s Kate Rooney joins ‘Money Movers’ to discuss Amazon looking to robotics to shrink logistics costs and boost margins.
From Street View To AI — How Google Maps Mapped The World
Google Maps is the world’s top navigation app, and in February it will turn 20 years old. It’s aiming to stay ahead using new generative AI features, and a nimbler Street View camera that will help it map at least three new countries. Street View cameras have taken billions of images and mapped millions of miles since Google co-founder Larry Page first had the idea for Maps. Now, Google Maps is available in more than 250 countries. CNBC got an exclusive look at the Street View service center and asked the head of Maps about data, privacy, traffic and AI.
‘Star Wars’ droids steal spotlight at Nvidia conference | ABS CBN News
Real-life droids from the Star Wars franchise stole the spotlight at Nvidia’s annual software developer conference in San Jose, California, on Wednesday (March 19). Disney showcased two droids that can walk, dance, and express emotions, and allowed attendees to interact with them at the Nvidia booth on the showroom floor in the San Jose Convention Center. “It can express happiness, it dances, but it can also express that it’s shy at the moment… It’s these emotions – it’s sort of a fully complete character that we were able to build. I think that touches people,” said Moritz Baecher, 44, a robotics researcher for Disney. The droid also appeared on stage with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his keynote speech on Tuesday. Known as BDX Droids, the creatures have appeared in the Star Wars TV show “The Mandalorian” and in two of the franchise’s video games, “Fallen Order” and “Survivor.” “You see not a mechanical system, you see a believable robotic character that emotes, right?” said Baecher. Although not fully autonomous – the droids are operated by a puppeteer with a controller – the droids do control their own balance and gait, skills they acquired through reinforcement learning. The droids have already interacted with guests at Disney parks and are currently touring various Disney properties. They also made a recent appearance on a Disney cruise.
Walk, Run, Crawl, RL Fun | Boston Dynamics
In this video, Atlas is demonstrating policies developed using reinforcement learning with references from human motion capture and animation. This work was done as part of a research partnership between Boston Dynamics and the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI Institute).