OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed during a recent podcast appearance that the company will develop its own humanoid robot hardware alongside specialized robots for data center operations. The firm has upgraded its former world-simulation project into OpenAI Robotics, targeting short-term robotic solutions to support infrastructure workers while pursuing the long-term vision of ubiquitous personal robots for everyday users. OpenAI also plans to launch its first screen-free portable AI device as early as 2027. Featuring a donut-shaped form factor, the upcoming gadget is expected to retail for more than $300.

The 2026 IFA consumer electronics trade fair kicked off at the Berlin Exhibition Grounds on Friday, running through Sept 8, with an expanded content creation zone and a new ICC Innovation Dialogue stage highlighting AI future tech, smart home, and mobility.

Founded in 1924, the event is one of the world's longest-running consumer electronics exhibitions. This year's edition underscores the industry's pivot toward AI-driven applications and cross-sector integration.

During the 2026 China International Big Data Industry Expo, the Shanghai Robotics Industrial Technology Research Institute, together with Maniformer and other industry leaders, issued a joint initiative on data quality and standards for the robotics sector, aiming to improve data quality, refine industry norms, and foster a shared ecosystem. The initiative targets key challenges in embodied intelligence and humanoid robotics, rallying consensus around three pillars: establishing unified data standards, sharing compliant high-quality data resources, and driving innovative commercial applications.

A research paper co-authored by Dobot, the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Nanjing College of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Nanjing Information High-Speed Rail Research Institute, and two other CAS-affiliated schools has been accepted for publication at the Findings of EMNLP 2026, the top-tier international conference on computational linguistics and natural language processing, which will take place in Budapest from 24–29 October. The study, titled “Meta-Learning Where to Allocate Experts: Task-Conditioned Layer-Wise Compression for MoEs,” proposes a novel compression method for mixture-of-experts models, marking a collaborative research achievement among the Chinese academic and industrial partners.

OpenAI officially launched GPT‑6 Astra in the early hours of Wednesday, a name derived from the Latin word for “star”, following its prior teaser line “The stars are almost aligned”. At the close of the launch event, OpenAI president Greg Brockman stated “Welcome to the AGI era”, an unusually bold claim rarely voiced by an AI developer for its product. The new model delivers sweeping gains across leading evaluation benchmarks.

Suzhou Gongzhi Marine Equipment Technology Co., Ltd., a developer of underwater robotics, has closed an angel financing round of nearly 100 million yuan with joint investment from Zhongxin Zhidi, Lihe Finance, Yinfeng Capital and HEU Asset Management. The proceeds will fund product iteration and mass production, order delivery and market expansion, R&D and patent deployment, plus recruitment and development of top‑tier technical specialists and management talent.

Maniformer on Aug 31 rolled out its 20,000th MEgo untethered data‑collection unit, the industry’s first mass‑production milestone, while also surpassing 1 million hours of high‑quality untethered data, making it the first data‑service provider to commercially sell such a dataset at that scale.

Ant's Lingbo Lab launches Zero-WAM robotics model, which learns tasks from human demonstration videos without task-specific training. It hit 46.95% average success on 7 unseen RoboTwin 2.0 tasks, beating baseline LingBot-VA by 29.5 percentage points. Dataset HumanGen pairs 74,200 human videos with robot trajectories across 8,600 tasks.

Investment in China's embodied-artificial-intelligence sector reached 93.5 billion yuan in the first half of 2026, up five times year-on-year, while deal count soared 137% to 322 transactions, signaling sustained investor appetite. Monthly funding activity remained fairly steady, with March and June each recording over 60 deals. Three hubs – Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai – captured 71% of all transactions and 79% of total value. Beijing topped the list with 100 deals worth 35.5 billion yuan, followed by Shenzhen (61 deals, 23.8 billion) and Hangzhou (34 deals, 9.2 billion). Suzhou and Wuxi also drew significant hardware-production projects, reinforcing the strong cluster effect in the Yangtze River Delta.

A humanoid robot manufacturing facility built through cooperation between Serbia, AgiBot Innovation (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd. (AgiBot), and Minth Group has officially commenced mass production in Šabac, with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić attending the launch ceremony. Vučić toured production workshops and product exhibition halls, and interacted on‑site with humanoid robot units.