Just over a week ago, I attended a major artificial intelligence conference in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s bustling high-tech district. It was packed with fascinating sessions touching on everything from recursive self-improvement—the idea that models can tweak their own code and advance indefinitely—to humanoid robots. And it featured a few legends of computing, including Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor … Read more
At IO-AI Tech, a startup about 45 minutes north of downtown Shenzhen, China, I glimpsed a wacky new frontier of blue-collar work. Workers wearing the company’s VR headsets, handheld controllers, and motion-tracking gear remotely control humanoid robots for workplaces like factory floors and convenience stores. The company wants the robots to do useful work, like … Read more
The humanoid robot of the future is a hulking specimen with a body that’s made in China and a brain that runs on American silicon. This week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, announced a blueprint for the bot, which combines a few different things: a 6-foot, 150-pound robot called H2 Plus from Unitree, a … Read more