robotics

In five days, an Ant Group affiliate open-sourced an entire robot brain — perception, depth, world model, video-action — while BAAI shipped a world model that learns robot control without action labels and Mistral entered robotics for the first time. The physical-AI frontier moved to open weights, and almost none of it came from a US lab. A map of the week that reset embodied AI.

Dmitri Dolgov's AI Ascent 2026 fireside laid out the multimodal world-action-language model, the driver-simulator-critic stack, and why the 13x safety number is the bill that competitors haven't paid yet.

Jim Fan's AI Ascent 2026 talk made the case that EgoScale's 0.1% teleop ratio, DreamDojo's 44,000-hour neural simulator, and a stated 95% confidence in robot auto-research by 2040 mean robotics has finally hit the data-and-compute curve LLMs hit in 2020.