A quiet day outside Tesla's Cybercab.
Big thing
Tesla's Cybercab turns one month old, and nobody agrees how it went
CNBC calls Cybercab's first month of rides in Austin "rocky" and says the hard part, expanding, comes next. Tesla also extended its Austin Robotaxi hours to 11 PM, up from 10 PM.
Split. @SawyerMerritt: Tesla "has nearly quadrupled the number of registered Cybercabs and hasn't had a single major issue" (171K). @ylecun: "fraught with issues and is very slow: 160 cars deployed. Only in Austin."
Tesla can now build Cybercabs much faster than it can put them to work: registrations nearly quadrupled this month while paid rides barely moved, and Musk himself says that spotting small animals at night is what keeps the hours short. Super annoying, because the cars and $30B of fresh credit are ready, and the missing piece is a camera-only system that can drive at night and on highways, which Tesla is adding an hour at a time.
Labs news
1. Adcock teases Figure 04's hands
"I'm bullish on embracing the complexity and building really capable human-like hands," Brett Adcock wrote. "F.04 hands are 🥰". Boston Dynamics went the other way on Thursday, dropping the pinky from Atlas's new hand to keep it simple.
Few direct takes. The hand talk was still about Atlas: @VraserX notes its engineers "spent a day with their pinkies taped to their ring fingers" before cutting the finger.
Heat: low · 47K views, 1 post
2. Türkiye's first registered humanoid dances at Teknofest
CANİKMAN, described as Türkiye's first humanoid robot entered in the civil registry, danced with children at Teknofest in Şanlıurfa.
Few takes beyond the clips.
Heat: medium · 302K views, 2 posts
Key research
A tennis-playing humanoid wins IROS's Best Entertainment and Amusement Paper
The LATENT paper's humanoid, which plays tennis, won IROS 2026's Best Entertainment and Amusement Paper award, "an example of the awesome whole body control now possible with humanoid robots". It matters because tennis demands whole-body reactions in a fraction of a second, far from scripted demos.
A Chinese embodied model tops Meta-World with 91.9
The SCMP reports a new Chinese embodied model scoring 91.9 on Meta-World, a simulated robot-arm manipulation benchmark, putting it top of the global ranking (150 pts on r/singularity). It matters because a Chinese model already held first place (Youibot's FabriVLA, 90.0), so Chinese teams are now trading the top of robot-learning benchmarks among themselves, not just competing on cheap hardware.
Whole-body control is basically solved, and the bottleneck has moved to perception: this robot only knows where the ball is because motion-capture cameras on the walls track it, and a robot that can't see for itself never leaves the lab. The robot-learning leaderboard won't show us who fixes that either, because its scores sit near the ceiling and are self-reported on setups that don't match, so a new number one says nothing about whose robots actually got better.