If you’ve ever thought about Harry Potter and wished for a sorting hat that could read the thoughts and feelings of new students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, your wish has now come true. Palo Alto-based startup Sabi … Continue reading The Beanie That Reads Minds
Preventing falls in a malfunctioning bipedal humanoid is one of the biggest challenges in the field of robot safety. Figure.AI, a San Jose-based manufacturer of humanoid robots, is introducing “Vulcan”—its new AI-based robot control system that enables the humanoid to … Continue reading Limping Robots for Security
LinkedIn user Nick Dimichino recently witnessed some disturbing behavior on a flight. He observed another passenger using Claude, the chatbot developed by the San Francisco-based company Anthropic, and verbally abusing the chatbot for three hours. Would we want to hire … Continue reading Is the Abuse of Robots and AI by Humans Acceptable?
An almost unbelievable story unfolded in Australia, offering a glimpse into the potential that people have to achieve great things with AI and use it for good. In 2019, Australian AI entrepreneur Paul Steven Conyngham adopted Rosie, an eight-year-old mixed-breed … Continue reading Dog Has Cancer; Owner Uses AI to Design a Drug
With all the skepticism that artificial intelligence regularly encounters in the public eye, it is easy to overlook how it is increasingly becoming a creative tool in the hands of artists. The most recent example is the creative use of … Continue reading A Thousand-Year-Old Painting Is Brought To Life With AI
The video showing a humanoid robot from Figure.AI autonomously loading and unloading a dishwasher is followed by another video. Once again, the vision-language-action model (VLA) called Helix 02 demonstrates that the robot (the Figure 03 model) moistens a table with … Continue reading Figure 03 Humanoid Tidies Up The Apartment
Who doesn’t know and love the little lamp from Pixar Animation Studios that appears in the opening credits of every new film from the animators in Emeryville, between Berkeley and Oakland? It all began 40 years ago with a Pixar … Continue reading The Lamp Robots Are Coming!
The New Year has just begun—earlier for us, yesterday for China—and 2025 already seems like ancient history. At least when it comes to advances in humanoid robots. For the Chinese New Year show, robots were once again integrated into the … Continue reading Kung Fu Robots! Impressive, But Really Just Smoke And Mirrors.
I have identified more than 140 manufacturers of humanoid robots for my upcoming book. Around 30 manufacturers were represented at CES 2026 in Las Vegas with 40 humanoids, plus just as many companies that manufacture robot components for them. And … Continue reading Round 1: How Robot Companies Troll Each Other
Less than three months ago, the first demonstrations of a humanoid robot by a Palo Alto-based company raised doubts about the capabilities and future of humanoids, but now the situation has changed. Figure.AI, a three-and-a-half-year-old startup in San Jose, showed … Continue reading The Robot as a Kitchen Helper