A stealth startup just told me it designs new motors in about 20 minutes. Even if it’s half right, the old rules of building physical things are done.

For decades, hardware and software lived in two different universes.

The common wisdom is that software ships fast, iterates in public, and (maybe even) breaks things on purpose. Hardware companies, in cont…

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I’m tracking almost 400 companies building humanoid robots right now. But do you see those robots in your home? In your office? In a warehouse.

Not yet, right?

But there are millions — maybe hundreds of millions — of robots all around us at this very moment. They’re just kind of invisible, because they look like cars, or vacuums, or cameras (Flock, we s…

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You don’t expect to find robotics hardware on the sixth floor of an office building in central London. Arms, legs, torsos, teleoperation rigs, Meta Quest headsets, engineers hunched over modified joysticks training machines to pick up stuff … that all feels kind industrial, maybe suburban-warehouse … not downtown in one of the world's great cities.

But t…

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I’ve been sort of sitting on this one for a month, and I’m so glad I can finally talk about it.

Back in June I interviewed Dar Sleeper, head of product design at 1X. He showed me video of the company’s new robot hands and told me to keep it under wraps. Hard to do, because what he showed me was genuinely stunning: fast, precise, weirdly human motion. I d…

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This is literally the year when humanoid robots start to leave the lab and appear in our homes. Our living rooms. Our kitchens.

Just sit and think about that for a moment.

Crazy times, no?

Neo, from 1X, will start shipping to homes this year. So I sat down with Dar Sleeper, head of product and design at 1X (and former Tesla), one of the very few people on…

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I heard today that some universities are going back to old-school paper and pen exams. No phones, no laptops, nothing digital. We’re back to walking uphill both ways 😀

That would totally kill my hand, but it would force me to actually learn stuff and be able to express it on demand.

Is that what we should be doing in education?

Last week on TechFirst, I s…

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You probably didn’t know you needed a robot dog to do yoga with. I didn't know that.

But the man who has shipped more robots into homes than anyone alive is betting that half the projected $5 trillion physical AI market will be for companions, not drone-like machines that just do work.

That dog, btw? It’s a quadruped, not a dog.

Maybe closer to a bear tha…

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I’m standing in a 300-year old warehouse in Boston where the sailcloth for the USS Constitution (yeah, that Constitution) was made. I’m with about a hundred humanoid robots.

Most of them are failing miserably at their jobs.

They’re called Sonny. None of them have been here longer than two months. Some arrived a few days ago. They’re picking, packing, sort…

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That pic I’m using for this newsletter? Yeah, totally misleading. Because AI in the factory doesn’t mean a factory with all machines, robots, and humanoids doing all the work and AI doing all the thinking.

That’s still science fiction.

We might get there in 5 or 10 years, hopefully with an evolved social consciousness about work, jobs, careers, and univer…

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Fourteen months ago, quantum navigation didn’t exist. Not in any real sense: it hadn’t been validated, hadn’t been tested, hadn’t been proven outside a pristine lab with floating concrete slabs and enough vibration isolation to survive a plane crash next door.

So anytime someone wanted to hack navigation on a battlefield, in a city, or over a country, th…

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I’ve been covering tech for a long time. Long enough to have watched the hype cycle eat itself, spit itself out, and then demand a second helping. (Thirds, anyone?) AI-washing, crypto-washing, metaverse-washing: brands always want to present themselves as part of the hot new wave. So do insta-gurus on LinkedIn.

The newest hype leader?

Agent-washing.

I rece…

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You can’t tell a robot how tight to hold a potato chip. That’s the whole problem.

Try this right now: place your fingers exactly 23.4 millimeters apart.

You can’t do it. There’s no ruler in your brain, no internal coordinate system, and no precision positioning system running in your motor cortex.

And yet you can pick up a potato chip without breaking it o…

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Everyone is talking about AI agents.

My local one is named Claw (so original!), lives in a Mac Mini (also so original!) and is about to start a long and hopefully productive career in fetching news articles and building ecosystem maps for me.

Most of the agentic AI conversation is vague, though: buzzwords and bold promises without a ton of substance. Or …

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Pretty obviously, AI agents are super-hot. There’s so much they can do, it’s literally a game-changer. My Mac Mini is on order.

But the security is a nightmare.

You give an AI system access to your tools, your files, and your accounts, then ask it to complete real work. The AI begins acting on your behalf. It reads your emails, writes code for you, calls …

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Humans are ridiculously good at learning.

I mean, it doesn’t feel that way while we’re trying to learn algebra or solve the quadratic equation, but show someone how to do something once and there’s a decent chance they can repeat it. Show them twice and they’ll probably get it right most of the time. By the fifth try they’re totally got it and they’re te…

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They plugged the AI character into the robot. It could talk. It could move. It could be in space.

After, it said:

“It felt good to feel.”

Is that just a chunk of math and code? Or is it the beginning, possibly, of something much more?

Check out our conversation here (and subscribe to the TechFirst YouTube channel to never miss an episode):

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Is your AI agent operating a humanoid robot to build airplanes in France while you sleep?

If not, you might just be living in the past.

That’s the intentionally-hyperbolic opener to my recent TechFirst with Jansen Teng, CEO/cofounder of Virtuals Protocol.

He’s connecting agents to robots … so AI agents are gonna start doing doing real physical work in the …

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I’m currently vibe-coding a fitness app, which also comes with a website. I generated the website in about an hour of work. Because I’m not a designer, I cheated and got AI to design it for me.

The result?

Instantly average.

That sounds bad, but think about it. That’s actually a big win for me … average is way better than I could achieve on my own feeble a…

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Machine learning, machine learning, machine learning. We’ve spent the last few years obsessing over what AI can learn. What about machine UNlearning?

Machine learning and AI have exploded in our massive current LLMs. That’s meant bigger models. Trillion-plus parameters. More data, more compute, more capabilities … more more, essentially.

But there’s an un…

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I had one of the most enjoyable podcasting experiences ever this week: doing a live podcast on the show floor at Web Summit Qatar with Amy Peck, CEO of EndeavorXR. Live just feels different. In-person just feels more real. And I’ve been wanting to dig into the future of XR for a while now …

Maybe the biggest take-away from our conversation?

XR isn’t tryin…

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