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Robotics

Skild's S1 learns brand-new robot tasks from a single video — no retraining

The Arena

Skild's S1 learns brand-new robot tasks from a single video — no retraining

Robotics has its "just prompt it" moment — or at least the strongest claim yet. Skild AI, the Pittsburgh startup behind the $14 billion-valued Skild Brain, says its flagship foundation model S1 can execute tasks it has never seen in training after watching one video of a human doing them — with no fine-tuning and no post-training. The company laid out the evidence in a technical blog post this week that is worth reading as a benchmark claim, not just a product pitch.

Dobot doubles H1 revenue as its robot-AI orders stack up

The Arena

Dobot doubles H1 revenue as its robot-AI orders stack up

Cobots are quietly becoming an AI business. Dobot (Yuejiang Technology, HKEX 02432) reported first-half revenue of RMB 320 million, up 106.6% year over year — and the number that matters most is a single line item: embodied-intelligence robot sales jumped more than twenty-fold to over RMB 45 million, roughly 14% of everything the company sold. The Shenzhen cobot maker's earnings read like proof that Physical AI is turning from demo reels into invoices.

Open-source robot brain DM0.5 takes the crown on RoboDojo

The Frontier

Open-source robot brain DM0.5 takes the crown on RoboDojo

The hardest leaderboard in robotics has a new number one — and this time, anyone can download it. Dexmal's DM0.5, an open-weight vision-language-action model, has taken first place on RoboDojo, according to Dexmal and QbitAI's report on the leaderboard. Its composite score of 24.90 and 19.34 percent average success rate sound modest until you see the field: as of July 2026, models at the top of RoboDojo's simulation board averaged just 8.80 percent success, and the real-robot board 12.8…

Generalist adds $200M to its robot-foundation-model war chest

The Arena

Generalist adds $200M to its robot-foundation-model war chest

Robotics-foundation-model funding shows no sign of cooling: Generalist, the San Mateo lab building models that make physical tasks general, has quietly raised around $200 million in a round led by 8VC — barely two months after closing a $400 million Series B in June. The new money pushes the startup's total haul past $650 million and lands it squarely in a sprint with General Intuition and Physical Intelligence for the "ChatGPT moment" of robots. Generalist spun up GEN-1 in April, a model…

AWS wants to make physical AI deployment a repeatable playbook

The Arena

AWS wants to make physical AI deployment a repeatable playbook

The biggest gap in physical AI isn't the model — it's getting robots and intelligent machines out of the demo and into fleets that run reliably for years. AWS is positioning itself as the one assembling that production stack, from cloud-scale training down to the small models that run on a camera inside a warehouse. AWS is building the tooling to move physical AI from demo to deployment, arguing the category will be won on operational plumbing rather than raw model size.

XPeng's robotics unit raises $900M to chase Tesla in humanoid robots

The Arena

XPeng's robotics unit raises $900M to chase Tesla in humanoid robots

XPeng's robotics unit raised $900 million in its first round — a shot across Tesla's bow in the humanoid race. The Chinese EV maker said its robotics business pulled in the money from IDG and Gaorong Ventures at a valuation of more than $6.3 billion, with Tencent and Alibaba on the cap table. It's one of the largest funding rounds for an embodied-AI startup in China to date, and it lands days after Unitree, another local robotics maker, priced a humanoid IPO on the mainland. Why it matters…

The Take — Lethal AI just crossed a line no one was watching

The Guardrails

The Take — Lethal AI just crossed a line no one was watching

If Ukrainian accounts hold, an AI-guided Russian drone killed three people in Zaporizhzhia on its own — no human in the loop to pick the target — as our morning brief laid out this morning. Months of institutional talk about "meaningful human control," about drawing the line before machines decide to kill, all dissolve into a single unverified strike that nobody could stop, reported like a war statistic. My take: this is not the moment autonomous warfare began.

ShengShu lays out a five-level roadmap to general world models

The Frontier

ShengShu lays out a five-level roadmap to general world models

ShengShu founder Zhu Jun used a World Robot Conference keynote to put a name and structure on where embodied AI is heading: a five-level roadmap for a general world model he argues must unify generating the world, interacting with it, and acting inside it — not a stack of separate models bolted together. Zhu, the ACM/IEEE/AAAI fellow who built video model Vidu, described the general world model as a closed loop rather than a single generator or robot policy: a system that understands the…

Autonomous Russian drone killed three in a strike Ukraine calls a first

The Guardrails

Autonomous Russian drone killed three in a strike Ukraine calls a first

A fully autonomous, AI-guided Russian drone killed three Ukrainians at a gas station in Zaporizhzhia — an attack Ukrainian officials describe as a milestone in weaponry untethered from human control. Two developments anchor the morning: the deadly autonomous strike itself, and the quiet fact that the computer guiding it is the kind of civilian chip Nvidia sells for robot vacuums and machine-vision toys. Ukraine says a fully autonomous Russian drone — guided by an off-the-shelf Nvidia chip …

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