Humanoids took real steps toward factories this week, but nearly every date that matters now lands in 2027. Issue #4 of Robotics Weekly covers Tesla’s Optimus line, Agility’s Digit pilot at AGCO, OpenAI’s humanoid and $350M in new money for robot AI startups.

Physical Intelligence opened a beta API so any robot team can fine-tune and run its models. Agility set a Nov 2 shareholder vote on its Nasdaq listing. ICON raised $200M in Austin. More in Issue #3 of AI & Robotics Weekly.

There's been a lot of marketing fluff and vapor demos in robotics, but @JasonMa2020's recent interview shows the industry is moving toward real deployments. @DynaRobotics

Those robodogs (probably Unitree Go2s) are from @getundaunted in Atlanta, running them as a patrol service. ~$3K/mo gets you two dogs plus 8 hrs/day of remote monitoring. My guess: teleoperated, not autonomous, with a human on the line to talk through the dog or call police.

Robot patent race is absolutely bonkers. @Figure_robot 100 US patents in 18 months. @AgilityRobotics 46, @Apptronik 15, while @Tesla added 3 robot-related to their 600+ arsenal (US filings only)

Issue #2 of my new AI & Humanoid Robotics Weekly is out: Ultra raised $62M for warehouse robots it leases by the month, RobCo passed a $1B valuation, and UBTECH and FAW-Volkswagen moved humanoid tests into car-plant logistics. 🤖

Today I learned California maintains a "Low Cost Automobile Insurance Program" for illegals and other client groups enabling them to drive legally with such absurdly low liability limits that they could literally kill someone and the policy will max out at $10,000. They hate you.

Grok Bot does an incredible job of cleaning up my mailbox from the spammer and scammer outfits that use new domains daily to bypass traditional spam filters 🤖