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Dear Readers,
The robots are no longer waiting in labs - they’re stepping into our homes. This week, Figure unveils its Figure 03, a humanoid that doesn’t just move like us but learns from us. It’s a quiet revolution: soft-bodied design, tactile hands, and a neural core named Helix that fuses sight, speech, and motion into one fluid intelligence. The line between appliance and companion just blurred.
In today’s issue, we dive into the rise of embodied AI—from Figure 03’s household debut to Genie 3’s world-building leap and the next wave of chip performance tracking with InferenceMAX. You’ll also find China’s self-healing battery breakthrough, Claude’s new plugin system, and a look at how governments are weaponizing AI sovereignty. The age of intelligent machines isn’t coming - it’s unpacking itself in real time.
In Today’s Issue:
🤖 Figure 03 humanoid robot is designed to learn and tackle household tasks
🏛️ Washington is using AI infrastructure deals to project digital influence in the Gulf
🌍 Nations are spending billions on "sovereign AI"
🌐 The EU is launching a €1.1 billion "Apply AI" program
✨ And more AI goodness…
All the best,
InferenceMAX tracks real-time inference performance
SemiAnalysis created a free tool that automatically tests AI chips every night to see which ones run AI models fastest and cheapest. The results show AMD and NVIDIA chips each win at different tasks - neither is always better. Both companies' newest chips use about 3 times less electricity than older versions, but the actual cost depends on how you use them and what specific AI work you're doing.
China unlocks self-healing solid batteries
Chinese scientists created a self-healing interface that keeps solid-state battery layers sealed without high pressure, solving a key problem that blocked commercialization. The breakthrough could make safer, longer-lasting batteries for phones, EVs, and even electric aircraft - offering up to three times more energy than current lithium-ion designs.
Claude Code adds plugin support
Claude Code now supports plugins—bundles that can include slash commands, agents, hooks, and MCP servers—installable with a single /plugin command. The goal: let users share, standardize, and customize development environments, workflows, and tool integrations easily across teams.
Fantastic to see Genie 3, our state-of-the-art world model, featured in @TIME's 2025 Best Inventions. From a single image or text prompt to an entire playable world, it’s the future of AI and entertainment. So proud of @jparkerholder @shlomifruchter & the team - huge congrats!
— #Demis Hassabis (#@demishassabis)
9:44 PM • Oct 9, 2025
Google DeepMind’s Genie 3 has been named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025. The model can generate fully playable virtual worlds from a single image or text prompt, marking a major leap for AI in gaming and interactive storytelling.
Gemini at Work 2025: Watch Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and industry leaders to discover how AI is reshaping businesses across the globe.
The Takeaway
👉 Figure 03 pushes humanoid robots toward real homes with soft-bodied design, improved sensing, and safer components.
👉 The Helix model fuses vision, language, and action for end-to-end learning in unstructured environments.
👉 Mass manufacturability is baked in: Figure built their new BotQ line to scale robot production.
👉 Real testing in domestic settings will expose the true challenges of generalization, failure recovery, and human-robot trust.
A tiny whirr. A soft plastic joint flexes. And suddenly, in the middle of a suburban kitchen, that pile of dirty dishes meets its match - or at least a robot is giving it a shot. That’s Figure AI’s Figure 03, the new humanoid robot built to tackle household tasks and learn from how humans behave by FigureAI.
Figure 03 is not just another bot. It comes with upgraded sensing, tactile fingers (able to feel as lightly as a few grams of pressure), cameras in each palm, and a design optimized for real homes - think soft coverings, wireless charging, and safer components for daily life. The intelligence beneath, “Helix,” ties vision, language, and action tightly together so the robot can pick up, fold, load, react - ideally in a fluid, adaptive way.
If machines can learn to operate in cluttered, unstructured spaces, that’s a leap for embodied AI. This is where perception, planning, control, generalization all converge.
Why it matters: These breakthroughs show AI is moving off screens and into physical spaces. The gap between simulation and real-world interaction is narrowing - and that reshapes what “deployment” means in AI.
Sources:
How 1,500+ Marketers Are Using AI to Move Faster in 2025
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Learn what’s working now, and what’s next.
U.S. AI Statecraft: From Gulf Deals to an International Framework
Washington is using billion-dollar AI infrastructure agreements with Saudi Arabia and the UAE to project digital influence. These deals link cloud and chip deliveries to governance requirements, with the aim of exporting US values—but at the same time, there is a risk that partner countries will become de facto technology colonies.
Governments are spending billions on their own ‘sovereign’ AI technologies
Nations are investing in domestic AI models to reduce their dependence on the US/China and preserve cultural, data law, or security-related characteristics. However, scaling and updating the models remain problematic, and some critics see this as a waste of budget compared to focusing on regulation.
EU rolls out $1.1 billion plan to ramp up AI in key industries amid sovereignty drive
The EU is launching the “Apply AI” program with over €1 billion in funding to embed AI in healthcare, mobility, energy, and industry—along with the political goal of strategic autonomy from the US and China. The stack of legislation (AI Act) is to be linked to innovation incentives.
