News
What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
Unitree starts pricing its IPO — the first humanoid maker to list on China's A-share market
Unitree Robotics began preliminary price inquiries for its STAR Market flotation on Wednesday 5 August 2026, the step that sets the issue price before subscription opens on 10 August. The offer covers about 40.45 million new shares — 10 percent of the enlarged share capital — with a target of 4.2 billion yuan (roughly 0.6 billion US dollars). China's securities regulator approved the registration on 2 July, so barely a month passed between clearance and pricing. Valuation estimates diverge sharply: investment banks put the company at about 40 billion yuan after listing, while CCB International sees 60 to 100 billion, with an optimistic case of 109 billion. The numbers underneath are what make this more than a financing story. Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025 — first in the world by unit volume — and humanoids brought in 868 million yuan, 51.78 percent of total revenue. A company whose business was quadruped robots is now, by its own accounts, mostly a humanoid company. It will be the first embodied-intelligence firm on the A-share market. That gives the sector something it has lacked: a listed pure-play whose quarterly numbers are public, against which the shipment claims that circulate around this industry can finally be checked. wujec.ai catalogues four Unitree machines: G1, H1 Pro, H2 and the Go2 quadruped.
Unitree G1 →Google Assistant gets a shutdown date: 4 September, and Gemini takes the microphone
Google has told users by email that Google Assistant will begin shutting down on Android and Wear OS on 4 September 2026, with Gemini taking over assistant duties. The rollout will take a few weeks to reach every device, and once it lands on a given phone there is no way to switch back. The cut covers smartphones, tablets, Wear OS watches, headphones and cars running Android Auto. Assistant survives for now in vehicles with Google built-in, on Google Home speakers and on Google TV devices, which Google says will move to Gemini in later stages. The handover was originally planned for 2025 and slipped by a year. The reason was capability rather than schedule: Gemini was comfortably ahead on knowledge questions, summarisation and open conversation, but behind on the unglamorous work an assistant actually does most often — setting a timer, toggling a light, controlling the device in front of you. The extra year was spent closing that gap. It is a large bet expressed as a maintenance notice. Assistant shipped in 2016 and has run on well over a billion devices; replacing it with a generative model everywhere at once means every routine voice command now goes through an LLM. Google's current workhorse model, Gemini 3.6 Flash, has its own profile in the wujec.ai catalogue.
Gemini 3.6 Flash →Billionaire family offices pile into robotics as AI-bubble fears grow
Investment vehicles for some of the wealthiest families in the United States, Europe and Asia are moving money into robotics companies even as doubts spread about a bubble in machine learning, Bloomberg reported on 4 August 2026. Two deals illustrate the pattern. The venture arm of the family office of Bernard Arnault, France's richest person, joined a Series A round for Humanoid, a London-based maker of industrial robots. Jeff Bezos' investment firm increased its allocation to Generalist AI, an American robotics-software startup. The logic behind the shift is that robotics companies sell machines that do measurable physical work, which makes their revenue easier to underwrite than that of model developers whose valuations rest on future capability. It is a distinction worth watching rather than accepting at face value: most humanoid makers remain in pilot deployments, and family offices are not obliged to disclose the terms or the size of their positions. Neither Humanoid nor Generalist AI has a profile in this catalogue yet. Both are on our list to verify with the companies themselves rather than through investor coverage.
AMD goes after Nvidia's grip on robot brains
AMD used its Advancing AI 2026 event on 23 July to enter physical AI in earnest, announcing Kria AI system-on-modules built around the new Ryzen AI Embedded X100 processors, together with a robotics developer platform that pairs the module with a carrier board and evaluation kit. The hardware is aimed squarely at the compute box inside a humanoid or an autonomous machine: up to sixteen Zen 5 cores for real-time control, an RDNA 3.5 integrated GPU, an NPU for inference and, in the top configurations, up to 128 GB of unified memory. AMD quotes more than 8,000 control decisions per second and vision-language-action reasoning below 100 milliseconds, and benchmarks the platform against Nvidia's Jetson line — claiming 3.4x better real-time reliability, 1.6x more free CPU cores and support for 2.3x more concurrent agents than the Jetson T5000. Independent measurements are not yet available; these are vendor numbers. The strategic point is less about any single figure than about choice. Nvidia's Jetson Thor has been close to the default brain for humanoid developers, and AMD is selling an open stack — Linux, ROCm, a hypervisor, PyTorch and ONNX — to robot makers who would rather not be locked to one vendor. The modules are sampling with early customers now, with general availability through ODM partners expected in the fourth quarter of 2026.