Robots, autonomous vehicles, and AI acting in the physical world.
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Nvidia open-sources Flora to make robot video labeling 125x cheaper than GPT-6 Astra
Nvidia has open-sourced Flora, a tool that labels robot training videos. Labeling one hour of video costs about $0.72 with Flora, versus about $88.50 with GPT-6 Astra and about $42 with Claude Opus 5. Those figures are Nvidia's projections assuming $10 per GPU-hour, not measured production costs. On a 50-video test, Flora scored 57.1% annotation quality against 53.7% for GPT-6 Astra, though most of the testing was done by Nvidia itself.
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Former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil sets out to build a fully automated drug discovery lab
Kevin Weil, who served as OpenAI's chief product officer and then led its science team, founded Warp Sciences, a startup that automates the experimental work of drug discovery with AI and robotics, and raised a $215 million Series A. The valuation is $865 million, and Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round. The company does not develop drugs itself. It sells research services to pharmaceutical and biotech firms, starting with refining the properties of promising molecules. It had about 20 staff at launch. The plan is to bring back to the U.S. work now outsourced to Chinese contract researchers and to build a lab where robots run experiments around the clock.
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Intel gets waiver after worries fuzzy US ban on foreign-made robots may hit fabs
On October 22, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted Intel a one-year waiver to keep using foreign-made robotic vehicles in its U.S. chip fabs. Intel said it was unclear whether the vehicles were covered by the ban on foreign-made robots, so it applied on October 16 "out of an abundance of caution," and approval came in under a week. The vehicles are automated guided vehicles that carry materials along set paths inside a factory. Bloomberg reported they are typically made by Japanese firms such as Murata Machinery and Daifuku, and the models Intel uses appear only in a confidential appendix.
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Jensen Huang’s Vision for Europe Runs on Plug-In Data Centers
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled DSX Pod, a plug-and-play modular AI data center, at Nvidia's GTC in Berlin on Wednesday. It arrives preassembled in a large metal container packed with Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin compute racks and can be brought online in 14 days instead of the months or years a conventional build takes. Nvidia says that cuts the time compute sits idle. In a 90-minute talk to 4,000 people, Huang also announced a full-stack humanoid robotics platform, a reference robot called Agile One due in the first quarter of next year, and autonomous-driving partnerships with Volkswagen and Mercedes.
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An Nvidia insider-turned-VC on why robotics hasn’t hit its ChatGPT moment, yet
Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for Nvidia's robotics platforms, says robotics has not hit its ChatGPT moment yet. She calls the field's current stage a "Lego era", with actuators, robotic hands, software and safety standards still being rebuilt. Her early-stage firm Techable VC invests in physical AI across robotics, materials science and life sciences.
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Google releases Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics, built for stronger physical reasoning
Google released Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics, a model that helps robots understand physical environments and practice in simulation to raise real-world success. According to AI Times, it does not drive robots directly. It is a high-level reasoning engine that automatically builds physics simulations such as MuJoCo and generates large volumes of training data to improve robot-control models (VLAs). That data raised a general VLA model's task success rate from 56% to 75%, and Argon scored 87% on the ERQA physical-reasoning benchmark without external tools.
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Amazon has over 1 million robot workers. What’s next for human employees?
Amazon runs more than 1 million robots in its warehouses, more than any other organization, according to Ars Technica, and it also employs more than 1.5 million full- and part-time humans. Executives say the robots take on the tasks with the greatest risk of fatigue and injury. Labor groups and independent researchers say AI-driven automation is not all upside for workers. George Mason University business professor Greenwood says collaborative robots differ from earlier automation because they work physically close to people and can dictate the pace of work.
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AMD acquires World Labs AI startup, upping the ante against Nvidia
AMD will acquire world models startup World Labs for $8.2 billion, pending regulatory approval, with closing expected by year end. Fei-Fei Li and colleagues founded World Labs in 2024 with $230 million, some of it from AMD. Li becomes AMD's executive vice president and chief scientist. AMD says the deal will help it understand how workloads are shifting toward robotics and physical AI.
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Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Fedorov pitches a private-sector robot army
Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said at the IT Arena 2026 conference that drones now account for more than 95% of all battlefield engagements. He launched a new private-sector project called 'Robot Army,' aimed at achieving full battlefield robotization. Ukraine already has more than 700 drone manufacturers, and Fedorov said robots should fight, not people.
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Anthropic Quietly Opens a Wet Lab to Move Beyond Simulation Into Real Experiments
Anthropic confirmed to Reuters on September 18 that it has quietly opened a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area. Where the company previously stuck to 'dry lab' data analysis, Claude now directly controls robotic lab equipment with minimal human oversight to run real experiments aimed at finding treatments for rare diseases. Life sciences lead Eric Kauderer-Abrams said the company will keep running both its own facility and outside pharma partnerships, since 'the ultimate test of biology happens in the physical lab.'
September 20266
- Anthropic opens AI-powered biology research lab ↗
- Agility's new humanoid robot will stop, squat to avoid harming human coworkers ↗
- GPT-6 Astra pilots a surveillance drone and runs a business on its own ↗
- I spent $4,000 on a robot dog from China ↗
- Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data ↗
- Travis Kalanick's Atoms might be getting into the robotaxi business ↗
August 202611
- Inside Meta's push to put robots to work in data centers ↗
- Anthropic wants to do for physical hardware what its Model Context Protocol did for software ↗
- Inside Meta’s Push to Put Robots to Work in Data Centers ↗
- Anthropic Unveils 'MHS,' a Physical-AI Version of MCP for Connecting AI Agents to Hardware ↗
- This Is How Anthropic Thinks AI Agents Should Navigate the Physical World ↗
- I spent a day at a robot "carnival" in Shanghai. Here's what I saw. ↗
- Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts ↗
- What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies? ↗
- The Next Big Influencer Is This 4-Foot-Tall Robot From China ↗
- Trump’s AI protectionism has come for robotics ↗
- US company’s AI lets Ukraine’s cheap kamikaze drones track targets on their own ↗
July 20264
- Gemini Robotics ER 2: powering robotics with video understanding, task orchestration, and multi-robot collaboration ↗
- At Waymo, an AI project isn't ready until its evals are — not when the model performs well ↗
- Enigma raises $71M to make controlling a robot as easy as adjusting the volume ↗
- Hyundai claims humanoid robot plan is not part of talks with striking workers ↗
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