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Articles about Robotics from podcasts, articles and papers, with links to the original sources.
Martine Rothblatt told Moonshots that her digital double, the Marvatar, is available to all 2,000 United Therapeutics employees, "any question 24-7, 365." She uses it to argue that videos, audio, documents and conversations, fed to today's language models, can reconstruct a person without copying every neuron.
On The Diary of a CEO, Professor Jiang held up a semiconductor to argue that technology is "specialization times globalization" — chips designed in California, printed by Dutch machines, made in Taiwan, assembled in China. If that trade fractures, he says, AI will not leap to general intelligence; it will be repurposed to watch people instead. The host offered a different reason to expect the same surveillance.
On the Moonshots panel, Alex argued that China's AI loyalty perks are the start of "universal basic tokens" — redistributed access to machine intelligence — while another panelist countered that cheaper tokens will mean bigger bills, not free ones. Emad Mostaque pushed past access to ownership, proposing 100 million publicly underwritten robots owned by the people, and Alex said that sounded like communism.
On Moonshots, Dave describes a hire in his early twenties who runs his agents entirely by voice, and argues the goal is to manage swarms rather than lean on a single copilot. The panel's optimistic jobs roundup runs straight into Emad Mostaque's warning that today's hiring is "the turkey before Thanksgiving" and Alex's view that every profession, trades included, is only a question of sequencing.
On the Moonshots panel, Emad Mostaque presented what he calls a Champion: a locally owned intelligence utility, sold to residents at a symbolic $1 pre-money valuation before outside investors arrive, with 10% of the equity set aside in perpetuity for every child under 20. He borrows the structure from his account of how TSMC was capitalized, and argues that as the cost of intelligence falls, the money will sit in robots, deployment engineers and citizen agents. He calls it an idea, not an offering — and it leaves governance, dilution and distribution unsettled.
World Labs released Atlas, a model that generates video along a camera path the user designs and rebuilds scenes from a handful of photographs. Its own garden example shows the seam: one photo leaves the surrounding buildings invented, while more photos pin them down. On Moonshots, the panel worked through what Gaussian splats are and why the approach might matter for robots, games and planning a vacation.
On Moonshots, Peter Diamandis described a new Unitree humanoid as hitting 12.66 metres per second after three months of development. Salim Ismail said the lesson is to stop copying humans; Alex argued general-purpose robots will swallow the specialists; Emad Mostaque predicted extreme machines will be kept off the street, and Alex proposed consumer, industrial and military classes.
Uber is investing in Zipline and putting drone delivery into Uber Eats, with a target of one million deliveries a day by the end of 2029. On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the panel treated it as the clearest test yet of Uber's strategy of aggregating customers while other companies build and fly the machines — and of what happens if those suppliers decide to sell direct.
Alibaba's Wan 3.0 and a relayed claim that 70% of Chinese AI token use goes to video sent the Moonshots panel into an argument about money: one guest said American labs chase revenue per token while Chinese labs give their weights away, another said video is the only market that will trust a Chinese model. They ended up disagreeing about whether world models or text models reach self-improving AI first.
On The Diary of a CEO, economist Steve Keen and commentator Konstantin Kisin agreed that machine production would not by itself give ordinary people an income — and then disagreed about where that income would come from. Keen argued only government money creation could supply it; Kisin, who says his anti-communist credentials are well established, said redistribution becomes unavoidable once AI does the work.
After touring Unitree’s headquarters and factories, Alvin Graylin said research and demonstrations still dominate its robot purchases, while upper-torso models are finding more commercial demand. His argument is about engineering economics: repetitive work may need capable arms, but not the balancing, repairs and extra parts that come with legs.
The physicist does not believe today’s ChatGPT or Claude systems have subjective experience. Yet he sees no fundamental physical barrier to conscious machines—and expects familiarity may change how people treat them without settling whether they actually feel anything.