Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Saturday, June 6, 2026
Generalist AI Raises $400 Million to Scale Robot Foundation Models
Generalist AI, a startup building foundation models for robotics, raised $400 million in new funding on Friday, pushing its valuation to $2 billion and total capital raised above $500 million. The round, led by Radical Ventures, also drew participation from 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Norwest, and Nvidia’s NVentures, along with angel investors including AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, Xiaomi co-founder Bin Lin, and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant. The company’s GEN-1 model, released in April, achieved 99 percent reliability across dexterous manipulation tasks and executed tasks up to three times faster than previous state-of-the-art systems. Capital will be used to expand robot-learning models, physical data infrastructure, and commercial deployments.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News
Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei Says IPO Is About Capital, Not Hype
Anthropic co-founder and President Daniela Amodei said Thursday at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco that the company’s decision to file confidentially for an IPO came down to capital access. “It’s a really big upfront cost to train the models and to serve inference on them,” she said. Anthropic’s annualized revenue crossed $47 billion in May, up sharply from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. The filing came less than a week after the company closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion valuation. Anthropic currently pays xAI $1.25 billion per month for compute capacity.
Sources: TechCrunch
Mira Murati Breaks 18-Month Silence, Previews “Interaction Models” at Thinking Machines
Mira Murati, former OpenAI CTO and founder of Thinking Machines Lab, made her first major public appearance in roughly 18 months at a Bloomberg interview in San Francisco on Thursday. Murati previewed what Thinking Machines calls “interaction models” — AI systems designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals, moving away from turn-based, prompt-and-response interactions. She declined to provide a release date. Murati also said she believes OpenAI would have “imploded” without her involvement during the board-firing crisis in November 2023, and warned about an industry-wide absence of structural checks on concentrated AI decision-making power.
Sources: TechCrunch
FBI and MI5 Warn That Chinese Spies Are Using LinkedIn to Recruit Western Sources
The FBI, the UK’s MI5, and the national intelligence services of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand issued a joint advisory Thursday warning that Chinese spies are using LinkedIn and other job search platforms to recruit Westerners with access to sensitive information. According to the advisory, Chinese intelligence operatives pose as recruiters for fake companies based outside China, targeting security clearance holders, military personnel, journalists, academics, and think-tank employees — particularly those with knowledge related to the Indo-Pacific region. LinkedIn responded that creating fake accounts “is a clear violation of our terms of service.” The advisory is part of an ongoing effort to counter Chinese espionage across Five Eyes nations.
Sources: TechCrunch
Poke Becomes the First AI Agent Approved for Apple’s iMessage Platform
Poke, an AI agent startup that operates via text message, has become the first AI agent approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, adding iMessage to its existing support for SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp. Founded by Marvin von Hagen, Poke has relayed roughly 100 million messages and helps users with scheduling, health tracking, smart home control, and photo editing. Gaining Apple’s approval took several months of verifying live support capacity and adapting Poke’s interface to Apple design guidelines. The news comes ahead of WWDC on Monday, where Apple is expected to announce major updates to Siri and AI developer tools.
Sources: TechCrunch
UK Startup Kirisense Wins Funding to Build Robotic Fingertips That Sense Touch and Slip
UK robotics startup Kirisense has secured funding from the Henry Royce Institute to develop tactile sensing technology that gives robots a more human-like sense of touch. The project, delivered in partnership with the University of Sheffield, will focus on building robotic fingertips that can detect shear forces and slip in real time using a compact optical sensing platform — a simpler hardware architecture than the camera-based systems most rival developers are pursuing. Founder and CEO Kangsheng Bretherton-Liu said tactile sensing will become “a critical enabling technology for the next wave of robotics.” The project, titled The Development of a Shear-Sensing Fingertip Prototype Demonstrator, is scheduled to begin in July 2026.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News
Columbia Professor and SceniX Co-Founder: Manipulation, Not Locomotion, Is the Unsolved Problem in Robotics
Columbia University professor and SceniX co-founder Yunzhu Li told Robotics & Automation News that robotic manipulation — not locomotion — remains the most critical unsolved challenge in robotics, and that realistic simulation is the key to closing the gap. “A robot may know exactly what an object is and where it is located,” Li said. “The harder challenge is handling it reliably when conditions are less predictable.” SceniX builds simulation environments from real-world inputs so robots can be trained and evaluated before deployment. Li said manipulation progress will come first in structured settings such as warehouses and factories, with home environments much harder to crack.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models (SWE-Bench Pro): Claude Opus 4.7 (64%) | GPT-5.5 (59%) | DeepSeek V4 (55%)
Top Open Source Models (SWE-Bench Verified): Mistral Devstral 2 (72%) | Qwen3-Coder-Next (71%) | Qwen3-Coder-480B (70%)
Top Small Models (15–50B) (SWE-Bench Verified): Devstral 24B (47%) | Llama3-SWE-RL-70B (41%) | Gemma 3 27B (est. 38%)
Top Edge Models (0–15B) (SWE-Bench Verified): Ministral 8B (Mistral) | Llama 4 Scout | SWE-Dev-7B (23%)
AI Leaders: Nvidia $5.4T | Alphabet $4.8T | Microsoft $3.1T
Robotics Leaders: Intuitive Surgical $160B | ABB $80B (est.) | Fanuc $32B (est.)
Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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