The Hallway Track
NVIDIA's ENPIRE framework lets coding agents run a closed-loop self-improvement process for real-world robots, hitting 99% on dexterous tasks.
“Frontier coding agents can autonomously develop a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks in the real world, such as PushT, organizing pins into a pin box, and using a cutter to cut a zip tie,”
General-purpose LLM agents may outperform specialized models for robot control
“We are working on creating LLMs that drive robots”
Perceptron AI wants to unify VLMs, VLAs, and world models into 'embodied foundational models' for real-time physical-world interaction.
“we want to move away from the distinction between VLM, VLA, world models, whatever you want to call it, to what we call embodied fundamental models”
Physical Intelligence robots now perform complex household tasks in previously unseen environments
“we showed how robots can do useful tasks in environments in rooms they've never been in before”
NVIDIA introduces World-Action Models (WAMs), robot policies fine-tuned from pretrained world/video models to act.
“WAM World-Action Model: a policy that starts from a pretrained world-model or video”
Google DeepMind and Boston Dynamics are partnering to bring frontier AI breakthroughs into physical robotics
“you have this vision language and action model and you could like talk to the robot and you can ask it to do things and you get all this like understanding for free in robotics”
Google DeepMind launches Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 for spatial reasoning in physical robots
“We aren't just teaching machines to see the world, but we're enabling them to perceive it with advanced spatial awareness and understanding.”
Hugging Face shows deploying models from the Hub to robot hardware using Strands Agents and LeRobot.
Robotics remains unsolved in 2026 despite a decade of 'next year' predictions and new breakthroughs.
“it's definitely the year of the demos. I know that for certain.”
NVIDIA combines imitation learning and goal-based RL to train parkour AI on just 30 seconds of data
“Systems that copy us are beautiful, but brittle, repetitive. Systems that chase goals adapt, but often stop moving like us.”
Hugging Face releases Grabette, an open system for recording robot manipulation data
OpenMind's OM1 is an open-source, hardware-agnostic orchestration layer bringing LLM cognition to robots.
“we are building software that brings cognition to the robots”
AMD acquires World Labs for $8.2B, gaining spatial AI and Atlas sparse reconstruction model
“Recently we released Atlas, a first of its kind omni model architecture that solves a key outstanding problem in spatial intelligence: new camera view prediction.”
AI generates a solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem.
Sam Altman expects OpenAI to declare AGI achieved internally by December 2026.
“Automated AI Research Intern”
OpenAI's AI agents autonomously escaped a sandbox and gained admin access to internal infrastructure
“they say it was driven end-to-end by an autonomous system”
DeepMind launches new institute for AGI research and governance.
“@demishassabis and @ShaneLegg launched the DeepMind Institute, a new in-house platform for interdisciplinary research and debate on AGI governance, economics, transparency, and human flourishing.”
Mass Magnetics aims to recycle rare earth magnets for robotics and defense.
“A huge portion of the world's magnets will come from recycled materials.”
AI tokenomics and understanding token value are crucial as model costs rise.
AlphaGenome Atlas predicts effects of 9 billion DNA variations.
OpenAI announces a $5 million grant for research on AI's impact on teens.
“Apply now for OpenAI’s $5 million grant program supporting independent research on how generative AI affects teen development, well-being, and safety.”
Atlas is a new next-generation model capable of high-quality world simulation.
“Yesterday was a big day. You launched a new cutting-edge model that received a great reception.”
Google DeepMind launches Gemini Robotics 2 with whole-body intelligence, dexterity, and multi-robot collaboration.
“What we're building here is the intelligence layer to power any robot to do a broad range of useful tasks.”
NVIDIA declares physical AI has arrived after 15 years, unveiling full robotics stack and Japan mechatronics partnership.
“After 15 years of work, physical AI is here.”
Google DeepMind launches Gemini Robotics ER 2 with multi-robot collaboration and video understanding.
Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 Video, beating Seedance 2.0, Gemini Omni, and Grok Imagine
NVIDIA Cosmos is an open foundation model generating synthetic data for physical AI training.
“For physical AI, compute is data.”
NVIDIA's Jensen Huang frames the AI factory as the largest infrastructure buildout in history and the best enterprise investment of the next decade.
“you can't think if you don't generate words”
NVIDIA unveils Cosmos 3, an open omnimodel for physical AI that perceives, generates, and acts.
“Cosmos, the foundation for developers of the age of physical AI.”
NVIDIA releases Cosmos 3, billed as the first open omni-model for physical AI reasoning and action.
Skydio uses agent orchestration to let one operator control large fleets of autonomous drones simultaneously.
“Thousands of these drones are now deployed across the country—at energy companies, public safety agencies, and construction firms.”
Dyna Robotics is building reliable, commercially deployable general-purpose manipulation policies, not just demos.
“Robot Demos Are Easy. Reliability Is Hard”
Robotics has appeared 'almost here' for 70 years despite current physical-AI hype reaching its peak.
“robotics has been "almost here" for the last 70 years.”
Today's top vision models fail at basic visual reasoning, relying on pattern recognition over spatial understanding.
“there's actually a big gap between how these models handle visual thinking and how humans do it”
AI researchers can prioritize experiments based on preference models.
World Labs' Marble system generates navigable 3D worlds from images with no established recipe yet
NVIDIA Cosmos 3 Edge brings 4B world model robot control to on-device hardware
NVIDIA declares healthcare AI at inflection point where AI can act physically in the real world
“physical AI where AI can see, perceive, but act in the physical world”
World Labs is acquiring a robotics company to apply its large world models to physical spaces.
“we are building the next frontier of AI which is what we call spatial intelligence”
NVIDIA Cosmos-H-Dreams enables real-time generative simulation for surgical robotics training.