Significant progress in AI and Robotics this week.
So, I summarized everything from Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, Figure, Cohere, Unitree, Field AI, Boston Dynamics, Deepseek, and more.
Here's everything you need to know and how to make sense out of it:
Google updated multiple product lines with new AI features, including:
—Pixel phones with 20+ AI features, like magic cues and live call translation
—Agentic capabilities in Search's AI Mode for AI Ultra subscribers
—Gemini for Government at $0.5/agency
Microsoft added a new Copilot function in Excel
This allows users to generate analysis, summaries, data classifications, and more by typing =COPILOT() in their cells
Microsoft has now officially caught up with Google in delivering agentic spreadsheets
Alibaba continued to ship, dropping two new products:
—Qwen-Image-Edit, an AI model for conversational editing of photos
—Qoder, an agentic coding platform that's 100% free to use; currently in public preview
Figure update: we have started making the walking of our humanoids more robust with the new Helix walking controller
As seen in this clip, it enabled our robot to walk across different surfaces without actually using the cameras to see what lies ahead
Cohere launched Command A Reasoning, a new reasoning model for enterprises
It outperforms similar privately deployable rivals, like gpt-oss and DeepSeek R1, on agentic, deep research and safety benchmarks
Also available via Hugging Face
China's Unitree teased its next flagship product: a new 180 cm-tall humanoid with 31 joint DoF
It will expand the company's portfolio of bipedal robots, although the launch timeline remains unclear at this stage
Field AI raised $405M in funding and introduced Field Foundation Models
These models are designed to grapple with uncertainties and the physical constraints of the real world, enabling safe robot behaviors when navigating in new environments
Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute debuted Large Behavior Models (LBMs)
These policies enabled Atlas to perform multi-step tasks like folding Spot legs, rope tying, or tire manipulation, while adapting to errors in real time
Deepseek launched Deepseek V3.1, an updated hybrid reasoner
It reaches answers in less time vs. DeepSeek-R1-0528 and promises stronger performance in tool use and multi-step agent tasks
On SWE-Bench, it scored 66%, nearing SOTA closed models
South Korean company WIRobotics unveiled ALLEX, a general-purpose humanoid
Built as a modular platform, ALLEX focuses on manipulation with highly dexterous hands, with 15 degrees of freedom (DoF) across fingers and wrist
It can also lift over 30kg
Daxo Robotics demonstrated its flexible hand, where each joint is driven by multiple tendons for robust control, in a new podcast
Each hand uses 108 motors, enabling 108 actively controlled degrees of freedom and infinite passive DoF
Researchers at Stanford debuted HEAD, an autonomous navigation and reaching system
It learns navigation, locomotion, and reaching directly from human motion and vision data, allowing humanoids to move around obstacles and touch an object if needed
IBM and NASA introduced Surya, an open-source AI to predict solar flares
Trained on 9 years of high-res imagery from NASA's SDO, it predicts solar outbursts faster than ever before and beats benchmarks by 16%
We're hiring for BotQ, our new manufacturing division at @Figure_robot:
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Apply here: figure.ai/careers
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@Figure_robot That's it for this week's AI and Robotics breakdown.
I share the latest research every week, so follow me @adcock_brett for more.
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