Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Kimi K3 open-source release sparks U.S.-China AI policy debate
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, an open-source model that evaluators at Arena.ai and Vals AI found competitive with flagship frontier models, triggering stock market volatility and a fresh U.S.–China policy debate. The Nasdaq fell roughly 1 % on Friday as investors sold chip stocks including Nvidia, coinciding with President Xi Jinping’s speech at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, warned the U.S. is ‘tying itself in knots’ with AI regulations. Dean Ball of OpenAI called a probable open-weight-dominant world ‘full AI communism’ and ‘a dystopian hellscape.’
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Nvidia and Hugging Face expand LeRobot with new open robotics AI tools
Nvidia and Hugging Face have expanded their collaboration on LeRobot, the open-source robotics platform, adding Nvidia Isaac GR00T 1.7—an open vision-language-action foundation model for humanoid robots—and the Isaac Teleop data-collection framework. Support for Nvidia Cosmos 3, a world foundation model for physical AI, is also planned. The additions standardize workflows for robot training, evaluation and deployment. The expanded partnership unites Nvidia’s community of more than three million robotics developers with Hugging Face’s 16 million AI developers. Nvidia Jetson Thor support for Hugging Face’s Reachy 2 open humanoid is also included.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Agility Robotics opens Fremont facility near Tesla’s Optimus factory
Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility in Fremont, California, just up the highway from Tesla’s factory, as the humanoid robot maker claims $300 million in contract orders and ramps toward a public market debut. CEO Peggy Johnson said customers including Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada are already deploying Digit robots in live operations—GXO alone has moved 100,000 totes with them. More than 30 additional customers are in talks. Agility expects to become the first pure-play humanoid company on public markets via a reverse-merger, with Digit v5—which can sense nearby humans—planned for this fall.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Toyota and Nvidia expand partnership for AI in vehicles, factories and cities
Toyota and Nvidia have expanded their partnership to bring physical AI across vehicles, factories and cities. Toyota’s future vehicles will offer Level 2++ advanced driver assistance using the Nvidia DRIVE AGX computing platform and DriveOS. The automaker has also developed a MISRA-compliant AI coding assistant based on Nvidia Megatron-LM and Nemotron to help engineers write safety-critical automotive software more efficiently. Factory digital twins built with Nvidia Omniverse and Isaac Sim will simulate robot movements before deployment. Woven by Toyota developed a multimodal vision-language model using Nvidia H100 GPUs to interpret urban traffic conditions and support city infrastructure decisions.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Fujitsu and Japan’s top robotics makers partner on physical AI platform with Nvidia
Fujitsu has partnered with Japanese robotics manufacturers Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric and Kawasaki Heavy Industries to build a collaborative control platform for physical AI, incorporating Nvidia Cosmos, Omniverse, Isaac and the Newton physics engine. Target sectors include manufacturing, logistics and healthcare, where robots would automate factory planning, warehouse operations and pharmaceutical transport. The platform is designed to be open and sovereign, with emphasis on interoperability, cybersecurity and data protection. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said: “Physical AI is the next industrial revolution—and it will be made in Japan.” Fujitsu plans to develop a commercialization roadmap with global deployment as the longer-term goal.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
1X unveils 25-degree-of-freedom tendon-driven hands for NEO humanoid robot
1X has unveiled new 25-degree-of-freedom tendon-driven hands for its NEO humanoid robot, featuring 22 fully actuated finger and palm joints and three at the wrist. The hands use high-resolution tactile sensing capable of measuring pressure, contact location and shear forces, and are rated to IP68 for water resistance using food-safe materials. Gear ratios of 5:1 to 15:1 enable force transparency, letting the robot sense external forces directly through its joints. The company says the hands can perform tasks including assembling LEGO models, pouring tea, installing light bulbs and communicating in sign language. 1X expects to manufacture up to 10,000 units this year.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Ant Group’s Robbyant open-sources LingBot-World 2.0 for hour-long real-time world generation
Robbyant, an embodied AI company within Ant Group, has open-sourced LingBot-World 2.0 (Infinity), extending stable AI world generation from minutes to continuous hour-long sessions. The model generates 720p video at 60 frames per second and uses a Mask of Bidirectional Attention (MoBA) mechanism to maintain visual fidelity during extended generation. A dual-agent architecture pairs a Pilot Agent for character actions with a Director Agent that dynamically introduces new events. The company also open-sourced LingBot-Video, described as the first open-source Mixture-of-Experts video foundation model built specifically for embodied AI and robotics, targeting improved physical realism and task completion.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models: Claude Fable 5 (95%) | GPT 5.6 Sol (est. ~91%) | Claude Opus 4.8 (88.6%)
Top Open Source Models: DeepSeek V4 Pro (80.6%) | GLM-4.7 (74.2%) | Kimi K3 (arena-est. ~85%)
Top Small Models (15–50B): Devstral 2 (est. ~72%) | Qwen3-30B (est. ~67%) | Phi-4 (est. ~55%)
Top Edge Models (0–15B): Gemma 3 9B (est. ~52%) | Qwen3-8B (est. ~48%) | Phi-3.5 Mini (est. ~40%)
AI Leaders: Nvidia ~$4.85T | Alphabet ~$4.31T | Microsoft ~$2.83T
Robotics Leaders: Intuitive Surgical ~$175B | ABB ~$165B | Fanuc ~$35B
Curated by JD · samwise.agency