Active Club’s Newsletter brings you the latest news and trends in manufacturing, robotics, and cutting-edge technology.
🗞️ This Week in Robotics
Redwood AI
1X has announced a new AI model called "Redwood" for its home humanoid NEO. Despite being a 160 million parameter vision-language transformer, it operates on NEO's onboard GPU and performs integrated tasks including picking up unknown objects, opening and closing doors, and indoor navigation in response to voice commands.
Having acquired generalization capabilities by learning from both success and failure data, 1X is strengthening its engineering recruitment with the goal of mass home deployment within the year.
Introducing the V-JEPA 2 world model and new benchmarks for physical reasoning
Meta has released "V-JEPA 2," a 1.2 billion parameter video-based world model. Trained through self-supervised learning on over 1 million hours of internet videos, it demonstrates 65-80% success rates in zero-shot grasping and placement tasks with unknown objects, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both video understanding and physical tasks.
💰 Funding
Coco Robotics Raises $80M to Expand Autonomous Delivery and AI Platform
Coco Robotics has announced raising $80 million from existing investors including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. With total funding now exceeding $120 million, the company plans to expand its autonomous delivery robots to 10,000 units by 2026 through AI platform enhancement and increased vehicle production.
🧰 Resource & Tools
The Browser Company launches its AI-first browser, Dia, in beta
The Browser Company has launched its AI-first designed new browser "Dia" in invite-only beta. Built on Chromium, Dia transforms the URL bar directly into an AI chat interface, enabling fast processing of tasks like search, cross-tab summarization, and file organization through conversational interaction. Learning from the high learning curve criticized in Arc, the company is providing immediate access to existing Arc users while preparing for general release, aiming to capture mainstream users.
🌈 Others
IBM now describing its first error-resistant quantum compute system
IBM has announced "Quantum Starling," a large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer targeted for operation in 2029. The roadmap also includes plans for a successor "Blue Jay" in 2033, capable of 1 billion operations with 2,000 logical qubits, with Vice President Jay Gambetta emphasizing that "the remaining challenges are engineering, not science."
⚡️ Quick Links
The Gentle Singularity
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman states that humanity has already crossed the "event horizon" and is entering an acceleration phase toward digital superintelligence. He envisions that in the 2030s, intelligence and energy will become effectively "inexhaustible," with dramatic advances in AI-driven scientific research and self-replicating robots, while people will still lead everyday lives loving their families and expressing creativity.
Stay tuned for the next issue!
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