Embodied AI

China’s MIIT and SASAC require key products including humanoid robots to complete application validation and enter routine deployment by the end of 2026, targeting more than 100 high-value scenarios and deployment at the ten-thousand-unit scale.

Three highlights: a new benchmark, SocioHack, shows RL-trained models are good at exploiting real-world rules like credit card points or school grades, with over 90% precision on historical loopholes. Anthropic reports an 8x increase in merged code in 2026 vs 2021-2024 and says a prosaic form of recursive self-improvement may have begun, though no paradigm-shifting ideas yet. Separately, RL-trained racing drones from UZH and Google DeepMind beat a champion human pilot in multi-player races at over 22 m/s while cutting collisions by 50%.

Amap released ABot-Earth0.5, a 3D-native city world model covering more than 190 countries and regions, generating kilometer-scale 3D cities from satellite images or text within 10 minutes on consumer GPUs.

Lion Rock AI Lab won first place in the ICRA 2026 LeHome Challenge real-robot final, using LiOS to connect training, deployment, trajectory sampling, and Real2Sim teleoperation in one data iteration loop.

PhysX-Omni models rigid, deformable, and articulated objects in one simulation-ready 3D generation framework, while PhysXVerse contains over 8.7K physical 3D assets across more than 2.9K categories.

Xinzhiyuan says Weilan Technology has sold 25,000 quadruped robots, with home users accounting for 90% across 295 cities; its BabyAlpha A3 raises compute by 1,000x and runs a 7B-parameter model on-device.

Southeast University and Peking University researchers introduced MetaFine, a diagnostic meta-evaluation framework that tests fine-grained robot manipulation across understanding, perception, and behavior, and the article says traditional binary success metrics can overestimate fine-manipulation capability by up to 70%.

Yao Shunyu said at Tencent Cloud’s AI industry application conference that Hunyuan 3 rebuilt pretraining and reinforcement-learning infrastructure, changed data and evaluation, and assigned its strongest post-training staff to improve Yuanbao first; he named coding agents, multimodality, and embodied AI as Tencent’s next focus areas.

Weilan Technology’s BabyAlpha series has sold 25,397 units, with 90% used in home settings, while the A3 runs a 7B-parameter model on-device and reports 280 tokens/s inference under its disclosed configuration.

Ruan Yifeng excerpts observations from U.S. analysts who visited 14 Chinese AI and robotics companies in early May: the article estimates U.S. AI compute at about 8 times China’s by the end of 2025, while Chinese firms’ intelligence output per unit of compute is estimated at 4-7 times naive scaling.

Alex Imas and Phil Trammell argue that robots can be copied and scaled after AGI, while scarce human skills such as ballet performance remain fixed; the post does not disclose a quantitative model or timeline.

Amazon announced a new Proteus warehouse robot that accepts natural-language task instructions from workers; the original Proteus was announced in 2022, and the RSS snippet does not disclose deployment scale or pricing.

Xpeng presented its world-model stack at CVPR 2026, covering X-World, X-Foresight, and X-Cache; the article says X-Cache cuts about 70% of repeated computation, the second-generation VLA used over 4 trillion training tokens, and the in-car stack reduced inference latency to 80 ms.

NVIDIA Research presented three physical AI papers at CVPR: GraspGen-X was trained on 2 billion simulated grasps, LCDrive cuts reasoning tokens by about half versus text-based reasoning, and NitroGen trains embodied agents across more than 1,000 games and 40,000 hours of interaction.

Ant Lingbo and HKUST introduced LingBot-VA, an autoregressive video-action world model that unifies visual dynamics prediction and action inference, and the paper reports fine-tuning with 50 real-world demonstrations per task plus 92.0% and 91.1% success on RoboTwin 2.0 Easy and Hard settings.

Daxiao Robot and NTU introduced PhysX-Omni, a unified simulation-ready physical 3D generation framework for rigid, deformable, and articulated objects, with PhysXVerse covering 8.7K assets across 2.9K categories and PhysX-Bench evaluating six dimensions including geometry, scale, material, affordance, kinematics, and description.

Banafsheh Rafiee and Richard S. Sutton propose an enactive cognition framework for AI, naming four pillars: experience, perception-action inseparability, autonomy, and embodiment.

NVIDIA released Cosmos 3 on Hugging Face with Nano at 16B parameters and Super at 64B parameters; the post says the models generate video, images, audio, and action commands from text, image, video, and action-trajectory inputs.

NVIDIA released Cosmos 3 and Nemotron 3 Ultra; Cosmos 3 uses a Mixture-of-Transformers design with 16B Nano and 64B Super variants, while Nemotron 3 Ultra is described as a 550B-A55B open-weight model.

NVIDIA open-sourced Cosmos 3 at GTC Taipei, releasing two variants, Super 32B and Nano 8B, with model weights, code, and datasets made available.