When Agents Get a Body: Rise of Embodied AI

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The Latest Agentic AI Development

The Humanoid Robot You Want to Watch

The humanoid race just got serious.
Figure AI revealed its latest robot — Figure 3 — a full-scale humanoid built not just to walk, but to work. Backed by $850 M from OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Bezos Expeditions, Figure is positioning its robots as the physical extension of AI agents — where LLM reasoning meets the real world.

What’s New

• End-to-end AI integration: Figure 3 runs multimodal perception and motion planning jointly, letting the robot “see, reason, and act” without remote tele-operation.

• Voice + vision fusion: Powered by OpenAI’s model stack, it can understand natural-language tasks and execute them autonomously — e.g. “tidy the desk” or “bring me that box.”

• Manufacturing shift: Figure’s new BotQ facility moves production from handcrafted to injection-molded and die-cast parts, aiming to lower unit cost below $70K.

• Safety focus: A new 2.3 kWh battery (UL 2271 certified) and thermal management system tackle one of robotics’ biggest blockers — fire risk.

The Bigger Picture: Embodied Intelligence Is the Next Platform

1. From chat to motion: The AI stack is moving from text to world models. OpenAI’s stake in Figure, Tesla’s Optimus 2 progress, and 1X Robotics’ domestic rollout show the shift from words to actions.

2. Labor economics: Goldman Sachs estimates humanoid robotics could add $150B to global GDP by 2035, with the first wave in logistics, manufacturing, and care.

3. Hardware bottleneck: Only 3–4 companies globally are close to scalable production. Whoever masters yield, energy density, and safety wins the moat.

4. Learning feedback loops: New research like PhysicalAgent (2025) and DreamWalker v2 enable closed-loop simulation → policy → real-world transfer — the same kind of data flywheel that powered LLMs.

5. Public reaction: While demos impress investors, critics note limited field deployments and high cost per robot hour — a reality check as hype meets hardware.

Why It Matters

Humanoid robots are no longer science fiction — they’re becoming the agent layer of the physical world.
If digital agents are changing how we work online, embodied agents will redefine how we work offline — in warehouses, homes, and factories.
The next decade’s competition won’t be “GPT vs Claude.” It’ll be who controls the bridge between code and motion.

Watchlist: Figure AI | Tesla Optimus | 1X Robotics | Agility Robotics | Sanctuary AI

Other News

• IBM – IBM announced three new AI agents on Oracle’s Fusion Applications AI Agent Marketplace to help automate enterprise workflows and boost operational efficiency

• Visa & Mastercard – Visa and Mastercard introduced separate agentic AI payment frameworks to verify trusted AI shopping agents and reduce friction in autonomous online transactions.

• Bubble – No-code platform Bubble launched the Bubble AI Agent (in beta), a visual development tool that lets users build web and mobile apps via drag‑and‑drop or conversational AI, combining generative speed with developer control

• Basis Theory – Payments infrastructure startup Basis Theory raised $33 million in new funding to expand its agentic AI commerce platform and capabilities, aiming to enable secure AI-driven transactions at scale

• Cube – UK regtech firm Cube acquired Germany’s Kodex AI to add agentic AI capabilities to its compliance platform, aiming to create a unified compliance, risk and agentic AI solution for regulatory workflows

• General Intuition – AI startup General Intuition raised a $134 million seed round to develop AI agents with spatial reasoning skills, training them on billions of first-person video game clips to enable real-world navigation and robotics applications.

• Chain – Freight-tech startup Chain integrated CloneOps’ voice AI into its platform, giving its AI agent the ability to handle phone calls for shipment tracking and bookings just as it does via email or text.

• Microsoft – Microsoft introduced new AI features for its Dragon Copilot healthcare platform, allowing nurses and clinical staff to integrate specialized AI agents into their workflows for automated documentation and improved patient care efficiency.

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