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Dear Readers,
Welcome to the Tuesday edition.
Today, like every Tuesday, the focus is on robotics. And to everyone's surprise, Ray Kurzweil, author of visionary books such as “The singularity is nearer”, has co-founded a robotics startup. Kurzweil sees the near future in robotics.
Figure is also teasing the third iteration of its robots. We can hope for great things!
In Today’s Issue:
Kurzweil’s Factory of the Future
Robots That Learn by Dreaming?!
An 8-Hour Alien Encounter Made with Veo 3
Satya’s Split-AI Vision for Work and Life
And more AI goodness…
All the best,
AI visionary Ray Kurzweil founds robotics startup
The TLDR
Ray Kurzweil’s startup Beyond Imagination is developing humanoid robots powered by an operating system called Aura that connects machines, people, and legacy systems. With $100M in funding talks, the “Beyond Bot” aims to revolutionize factories by combining generative AI with physical labor, creating a new era of adaptive, app-like manufacturing.
When a two-legged robot independently searches for errors, orders spare parts and gets smarter by the minute, the future leaps straight into production. This is exactly what Beyond Imagination, the new start-up from Ray Kurzweil - the US inventor of market-ready OCR and speech systems, bestselling author of The Singularity Is Near and former Director of Engineering at Google - promises.
According to Reuters, the young company is currently negotiating over 100 million dollars in fresh capital at a valuation of around 500 million. At its heart is the “Beyond Bot”, a humanoid worker that uses the Aura operating system to connect people, robots and old systems to form an adaptive swarm - a factory should be as easy to upgrade as a smartphone app.
This opens up a new data universe for the AI community: billions of sensor data meet large language model logic and combine thinking with action. Open interfaces promise that future Git Pushes will not only be able to move code, but also real robot arms.
Why it matters: Humanoid robots bring generative AI from the screen to wrenches and conveyor belts - a potential liberating blow against global skills shortages. Those who understand their APIs today will shape a software-defined industry tomorrow.
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In The News
DreamGen: Teaching Robots to Dream Their Way to Real-World Skills
DreamGen is a new robot learning engine that generates massive amounts of training data using video diffusion models, effectively letting robots "dream" in pixels instead of relying on human supervision. By fine-tuning video models and simulating diverse scenarios, it creates labeled robot videos—turning imagination into motor control data. This enables robots like GR1 and Franka to learn new behaviors (like scooping or ironing) from single-task datasets, with real-world performance leaps from 0% to over 40% success. DreamGen transforms video generators like Sora into neural physics engines, pushing robots beyond the lab and into everyday environments.
The Visitors: An 8-Hour Sci-Fi Made with Veo 3
A lone creator used Veo 3 to produce The Visitors, a short sci-fi film imagining first contact with alien life. The entire project—from concept to final cut—was completed in just 8 hours using AI video tools.
Satya Nadella Wants Two Separate AIs: Work and Personal
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says your work and personal AI agents must remain strictly separate, with no data crossover. This “cognitive partitioning” ensures privacy and trust in a future powered by AI assistants.
Graph of the Day
Solar Power is now 10% of World's Power Generation. The sun radiates more energy onto the earth in one hour than the entire human race consumes in a year.
Figure.03 is already able to walk
“F.03 is officially walking!!! This is the most advanced hardware I’ve ever seen” (Brett Adcock, Figure CEO)
It looks like we are about to make great leaps in the development of robotics. After the great success of Figure.02, which is now even widely used in the automotive industry for car production, we can expect great things from the next iteration.
Ray Kurzweil's humanoid robot startup in talks for $100 million investment
Ray Kurzweil's start-up Beyond Imagination has received USD 100 million in Series B capital and is targeting the industrial roll-out of its humanoid “Beyond Bot” and OS “Aura”. The duo wants to operate pharmaceutical, chip and car factories autonomously and orchestrate human-machine teams - a potential game-changer against the shortage of skilled workers and for the re-industrialization of the USA.
Sensmore: Physical AI makes 100-ton trucks autonomous
Berlin-based startup Sensmore has raised €6.5 million to transform huge construction machines into self-driving robots using a retrofit kit (cameras, 4D radar, vision-language-action models). Wheel loaders and haul trucks can now complete load & carry cycles without humans - even in the dust of opencast mining. The platform provides real-time data, reduces costs and strengthens Europe's raw materials industry for the era of chronic labor shortages.
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