🤖 Figure's New Fitness Program

Good Morning, Roboticists!

The humanoid robot race is finally splitting into reality and theater.

NEW LAUNCH

Figure Dares to Show What Others Hide

👀 What’s happening: Figure has been publishing rough videos of Figure 03 running, talking, charging itself, and handling objects in ordinary spaces. No staging. No narration. No safety theater. Taken together, these clips form a blunt capability list showing what the robot can already do, not what it hopes to do later.

🌍 How this hits reality: Most robotics companies avoid this stage because it exposes weakness. Figure leaned into it. Running shows real dynamic control. Voice plus manipulation shows intent bound to action. Autonomous docking and shipping boxes signal repeatability. Unsupervised home operation drags safety, liability, and trust into the open. This collapses the usual gap between lab success and deployment.

🤖 Key takeaway: This is comfortable by design. Figure is forcing the conversation forward by showing messy reality, not polished demos. That is what real progress looks like. The risk is visible. So is the lead.

SUBTITLE

ALLEX Abandons Dominance for Deliberate Restraint

👀 What’s happening: WIRobotics just presented ALLEX, a humanoid robot that makes its point by not showing off. While others flex torque and payload charts, ALLEX demonstrated a handshake. It senses forces down to 100 gram-force without tactile sensors and applies up to 40 newtons, adjusting grip instantly instead of overpowering.

🌍 How this hits reality: Humanoid robotics has leaned hard into violence aesthetics. Lifting cars. Smashing objects. Celebrating raw strength. That logic keeps robots boxed away from people. ALLEX rejects it. Low friction joints, back-drivable motors, and gravity compensation enable close contact. A 700 gram hand lifting 3 kilograms matters less than proving control beats brute force.

🤖 Key takeaway: Force without restraint does not scale. ALLEX hints the market may reward softness over spectacle. If robots are to live among humans, dominance becomes a flaw. Precision, compliance, and calm physical behavior emerge as the real competitive edge.

LEAK

China’s Factory “Humanoids” Are Half-Baked Pretenders

👀 What’s happening: A Financial Times report says China-based UBTech’s latest industrial humanoid, the Walker S2, achieves only about 30 %–50 % of a human worker’s productivity on real factory tasks like box-stacking and quality checks, and even these are narrow uses rather than broad factory work.

🌍 How this hits reality: After years of glossy demos of robots running, dancing, or swapping batteries, the real world shows a gap between show and substance: “Factory robots" still struggle with basic adaptability and are far less efficient than human labor, and often need humans to change tools or intervene. The big irony is that the current industrial robot boom is driven more by defensive investment anxieties than by clear-sighted cost-benefit returns.

🤖 Key takeaway: Right now “factory robots” are more of a stage prop than a true labor replacement; efficiency is half-real, half-hype, and the hard work of making them genuinely productive in messy, unstructured factory settings is still ahead.

QUICK HITS

• Ant Group subsidiary Robbyant open-sourced LingBot-Depth and partnered with Orbbec for embodied AI deployment.
• The NHS is piloting AI and robotic technology to speed up and improve lung cancer detection and biopsy.
• Louisiana launched a pilot with Persona AI to test humanoid robots in a live heavy-industry steel fabrication facility.
• AfricAI signed an exclusive multi-year agreement to commercialise and deploy Micropolis Robotics’ advanced robotics platforms across Africa.
• UAB performed the Southeast’s first robot-assisted kidney transplant, advancing minimally invasive transplant care.

READ MORE

Let the Future Come to Your Inbox

Stay ahead without drowning in information. We turn the most important signals across AI, tech, marketing, and future products into 5-minute reads you can actually finish.

• AI Secret uncovers what really matters in AI
• Bay Area Letters decodes tech and business shifts from Silicon Valley
• Robotics Herald tracks how robots move from labs into daily life
• Marketing Secret breaks down real growth and go-to-market playbooks
• The Hardwire explores hardware, consumer tech, and what’s coming next
• Oncely helps you discover the next wave of AI products and launches

TOGETHER WITH US

AI Secret Media Group is the world’s #1 AI & Tech Newsletter Group, reaching over 2 million leaders across the global innovation ecosystem, from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft to top AI labs, VCs, and fast-growing startups.

We've helped promote over 500 Tech Brands. Will yours be the next?

Email our co-founder Mark directly at mark@aisecret.us if the button fails.