Robotics Special: More trouble for Apple's robotics ambitions

Welcome back, Superhuman. Apple’s AI troubles are far from over, with a wave of talent departures threatening to derail the iPhone maker’s AI and robotics effort. Meanwhile, China is leveraging its lead in robotics to sidestep a common economic bottleneck and lock in a powerful trade advantage.

WHAT’S NEXT

The most important news and breakthroughs in robotics this week

1. Apple’s robotics effort has hit a speedbump: The company's lead robotics researcher, Jian Zhang, has reportedly jumped ship to Meta's Robotics Studio. The news comes as part of a broader talent exodus that's seen about ten researchers depart Apple’s Foundation Models team to competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic this year. As Apple scrambles to keep up in the AI race, structural challenges continue to hamstring the iPhone maker’s long-term ability to innovate in AI and robotics.

2. Elon Musk bets Tesla’s future on its Optimus initiative: The CEO has predicted humanoid robots will account for roughly 80% of the company's future value, essentially demoting the car business that put Tesla on the map. The claim — part of Tesla's "Master Plan Part IV" — has raised eyebrows, especially since Optimus is still in development with no clear revenue stream yet. As its vehicle business continues to plummet, the company is betting that robot deliveries to other companies will kick off in late 2026.

3. China’s robots are helping it undercut global trade competition: While most countries are forced to abandon cheap manufacturing as they develop, China has seemingly found a workaround, according to the Financial Times. The country is replacing human labor with about 280K industrial robots annually — half the world's total. This has enabled China to keep low-end production at home even as wages climb, edging out Japanese competition by 40% on price, and ramping up its global export share in labor-intensive industries.

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ROBOTS IN ACTION

How robots are transforming the world around us

👔 Ambassador GPT: China rolled out a trilingual humanoid robot receptionist to greet world leaders and journalists at the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. When pressed about India-China relations, the robot had the diplomatic wherewithal to play it safe, refusing to comment on politics. See it get interviewed by reporters here.

🍽️ Dish It Out: Figure has posted a video of its 02 humanoid robot stacking, sorting, and loading dishes in a dishwasher with centimeter-scale precision. Using the same Helix AI model that already powers towel folding and package sorting, the robot learned the new skill purely through new training data rather than task-specific programming — a sign that the company’s general-purpose architecture is scaling exactly as intended.

🐙 Droid of the Deep: UK and Brazilian researchers have unveiled a tentacle-armed robot designed to inspect offshore infrastructure at crushing depths of nearly 10,000 feet. The flexible robot can withstand forces up to 300 g while maintaining precision — a potential game-changer for an industry facing over $100B in decommissioning costs by 2030.

INDUSTRY SNAPSHOT

Everything else you need to know this week

Here are the biggest developments in the robotics space that you should know about:

• Chinese robotics company UBTECH has picked up $1B in financing to build a "superfactory" to expand its humanoid robot production in the Middle East.

• AI startup Runway is expanding beyond creative AI tools into robotics, using its video-generating world models to help train robots and self-driving cars.

• Google DeepMind and Intrinsic have developed RoboBallet, an AI system that uses reinforcement learning to coordinate up to 8 robots in shared workspaces.

• Orchard Robotics, founded by Thiel fellow Charlie Wu, has raised $22M to expand its vision AI technology for more precise crop management.

• Waymo is expanding its robotaxi service to Denver and Seattle, planning to test autonomous driving in harsher weather conditions.

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ROBOT OF THE WEEK

A robot that caught our eye this week

Those long walks don’t have to feel so long. 

The Moonwalkers Aero are robotic shoes by Shift Robotics that can wheel you around at speeds of up to 7 mph. The 4.3-pound shoes strap onto your existing footwear and automatically adjust power based on your walking pace, with F1-inspired air intakes to keep the motors cool.

You can check them out here.

ROBO REEL

Watch: Robots get exposed at the International Humanoid Olympiad in Greece

Robots gathered at the birthplace of the Olympics, where they tried their hand at soccer, archery, and shadow boxing — and safe to say, it didn’t quite go as planned. As AI advances rapidly thanks to vast online datasets, humanoid robots remain roughly 100,000 years behind in learning from real-world data, according to Science Robotics.

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Until next time,

Zain and the Superhuman AI team