Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock Thursday revealed a new machine learning model for humanoid robots. The news, which arrives two weeks after Adcock

Fresh off its split from OpenAI, Figure AI's new model lets humanoid robots grab anything, work together, and respond to spoken commands.

In a significant move in the AI world, California-based Figure has revealed Helix, a generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that unifies perception, language understanding, and learned control to overcome multiple longstanding challenges in robotics.

Your story looks at electric-vehicle makers in China that are starting to work on humanoid robots, but I want to ask about a crazy stat. In China, 53% of vehicles sold are either electric or hybrid, compared with 8% in the US. What explains that?

Ant Group, the Alibaba-linked fintech giant, is venturing into the humanoid robot industry, joining a growing list of major Chinese tech companies exploring this emerging field.

Ant Group has recently begun hiring for roles in embodied intelligence humanoid robot systems and applications, with annual salaries of up to RMB 1 million ($137,300), according to job listings on the Chinese recruitment platform Boss Zhipin.