AI in the physical world: humanoid robots, embodied foundation models and the ability to act in real settings.
Chipmaker AMD is acquiring World Labs, a startup focused on spatial intelligence. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li will join AMD's leadership team as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist. The all-stock deal is valued at about $8.2 billion, according to AMD. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, pending regulatory approval.
AMD is acquiring World Labs, one of the leading developers of deep learning models intended to understand physical reality, in an $8.2 billion deal, the two companies said today. World Labs justified the deal in a statement saying that AI development required “close collaboration across model research, systems and compute.”
Microsoft Research systematically measured mobile manipulation robot workloads and found that offloading physical AI inference from onboard GPUs to edge or cloud GPUs can improve task success, support larger models and extend battery life.
NVIDIA released Isaac ROS 5.0 at ROSCon in Toronto, Canada. The collection of ROS-based GPU-accelerated packages adds agentic workflows and platform support to help developers build, customise and deploy robot applications faster.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics ER 2 as a high-level brain for robots, supporting video understanding, multi-step task orchestration and multi-robot collaboration, while delegating action execution to lower-level VLA models.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2, a next-generation robot intelligence layer achieving whole-body control of a complete humanoid robot for the first time, with fine manipulation using both hands and grippers.
Hugging Face released Grabette, an open-source system recording manipulation demonstrations with a handheld gripper and two cameras, producing robot-ready datasets without robots or teleoperation equipment. The handheld hardware costs about €490 in materials, with the accompanying motorised Gripette gripper around €120. Hardware CAD, Raspberry Pi collection software and browser-based processing are all open-source.
Mistral AI released its first embodied navigation model, Robostral Navigate. The 8B model uses one ordinary RGB camera without LiDAR or depth sensors, achieving 76.6% success in unseen R2R-CE validation environments, 9.7 percentage points above the best single-camera approach and 4.5 points above the best depth- or multi-camera system.
Hugging Face released LeRobot v0.6.0, introducing world model policies VLA-JEPA, FastWAM and LingBot-VA, new VLAs GR00T N1.7, MolmoAct2, EO-1, EVO1 and Multitask DiT, and a unified reward model API with Robometer and TOPReward for the robotics learning loop.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, an upgraded reasoning-first robotics model with stronger spatial reasoning and multi-view understanding. New instrument reading capabilities cover circular pressure gauges, level indicators and digital readouts.