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Good morning, human brains, and welcome back to your daily munch of AI news.

Here’s what’s on the menu today:

• This robot is 12x faster at stealing your job. 🤖 💕

  NVIDIA partnered with Hugging Face.

• This Chinese bot killed Tesla Optimus? 🤖 🚗

  XPeng unveiled Iron.

• Scrape like a hacker (no code) 🦊 🔎

  Scrape any website with plain English.

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Peep today's ‘What Would You Do?’ at the bottom. 👇

MAIN COURSE

NVIDIA & Hugging Face sitting in a tree 🤖 💕

On Tuesday, NVIDIA partnered with Hugging Face. They launched AI tools at the Conference on Robot Learning, launching tools to democratize robotics development.

What's the point?

They're combining Hugging Face's LeRobot framework with NVIDIA's tech like GR00T to create an open ecosystem where developers can share and build on each other's work.

What's Project GR00T?

NVIDIA's new initiative offering six workflows for humanoid robot development - from teaching robots to walk to helping them interact naturally.

What’s the training process like?

Unlike language AIs that learn from text, robots need physical data. NVIDIA's Isaac Lab lets developers train in simulation before real-world deployment.

What are the new tools?

• Cosmos tokenizer: Processes visual data 12x faster

• NeMo Curator: Speeds up video processing 7x

Who's using it?

Major players like Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, and 1X Technologies have already jumped on board.

Why is this significant?

It could dramatically accelerate robotics progress by making advanced development tools widely available.

What else has NVIDIA been up to?

Yesterday, we covered NVIDIA’s new AI Blueprint. It turns videos into searchable, summarizable content using natural language.

Back in March, we reported on NVIDIA’s GR00T. It stands for Generalist Robot 00 Technology and enables humanoid robots to learn human movements from observation.

In August, we covered Mistral-NeMo-Minitron 8B. It’s NVIDIA and Mistral’s model that’s small enough to run on your laptop, but smart enough to compete with the big boys.

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SIDE SALAD

China's robots eat your lunch 🤖 🚗

On Tuesday, XPeng unveiled Iron. It’s a 5'8" humanoid robot that's currently assembling their P7+ electric vehicles.

What can Iron do?

With 60+ joints and 200 degrees of freedom, it walks autonomously, simulates human postures, and uses sensitive hands to grasp and manipulate objects.

What's under the hood?

Iron uses XPeng's car AI and Turing chip (40-core processor), paired with their Eagle Vision system for navigation and task execution.

Is this original?

Not exactly. It follows Tesla's playbook of adapting car AI for robots, and Figure AI claims XPeng copied their spine and hip design.

What's the bigger picture?

XPeng plans to expand Iron beyond factories into retail, offices, and homes, part of China's aggressive push into robotics.

Why should we care?

China's manufacturing power and government backing could help them dominate robotics, like they did with EVs and smartphones.

What's at stake?

U.S. leadership in robotics — China's rapid progress in AI and manufacturing could translate into a global lead.

What other humanoid robots are out there?

Quite a bit. In March, we covered Apptronik’s Apollo. Apptronik partnered with Mercedes-Benz to integrate Apollo robots into the automobile manufacturing process.

In April, we reported on Boston Dynamic’s new Atlas robot. It’s an all-electric, humanoid robot that replaced the hydraulic version of Atlas.

In August, we covered the Figure 02 humanoid robot. It has a 50% larger battery capacity and 3x the computing power of its predecessor.

In September, we reported the Norwegian NEO Beta. It’s a humanoid robot designed to assist in home environments.

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YOUR DAILY MUNCH

Think Pieces 🧠

What’s the Earth BioGenome Project? It aims to sequence the genomes of 1.67 million complex life forms by 2032 and has already completed 3,000 genomes.

Startup News 💰

Caitlin Kalinowski is joining OpenAI. She previously led Meta’s augmented reality glasses team. She’ll spearhead robotics and consumer hardware projects.

Netflix appointed Mike Verdu as Vice President of Generative AI for games. The goal is to drive AI-enhanced game development and player experiences.

Research 👨‍🔬

WebRL — a reinforcement learning framework that trains open large language models into effective web agents using a self-evolving curriculum and robust reward mechanisms.

TOMATO — a new benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate AI models' ability to understand and reason about sequences of video frames.

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WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Darth Vader died. 💀

Which Sith Lord should take over? 👇

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Until next time 🤖😋🧠