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Good Morning. This is a robotics special. Nvidia is reportedly weighing another $1 billion for Figure, a robot hand has learned to split a silk thread into 16 strands, and California has told a robot-fighting startup to stop staging bouts with humans.
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TODAY IN AI
1. Nvidia is reportedly considering another $1 billion in humanoid maker Figure AI. The report comes from The Information, citing a person familiar with the matter, and neither company has confirmed it. Figure is said to be raising at roughly a $38 billion pre-money valuation. That can't be compared directly with the $39 billion post-money valuation from its September 2025 Series C, which Nvidia also joined. Figure stays private and no terms or closing date have been reported.
2. Agilink, a spin-off of AgiBot, showed a robot hand doing Suzhou silk embroidery. In the demo video it splits a silk thread into 16 strands, threads a needle, stretches fabric across a frame and stitches. Master embroiderer Fu Xianghong trained it. Agilink says the hand weighs 630 g, repeats positions to about 0.2 mm and has fingertip sensors that detect 0.08 mm deformations. Those specs are the company's, not independent tests. New Atlas also notes Agilink hasn't confirmed exactly which model appears in the video.
3. California ordered robotics startup REK to stop unsanctioned fights between humans and humanoid robots. On Sept 18, YouTuber Frankie LaPenna fought three humanoids in a cage in San Francisco. The California State Athletic Commission says organizing such fights without a license is a misdemeanor, and its letter suggests it wouldn't have stepped in if only robots had been fighting. REK's founder shared the letter publicly. It is unclear whether the bout was a sport or a promotional stunt.
FROM THE FRONTIER
Robots learn from people who get paid. Mecka AI just raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia, with Nvidia and Microsoft's M12 taking part. Its business is paying people to record everyday tasks, like making coffee or fixing a car, while wearing body sensors and using smartphones. TechCrunch frames it as doing for robots what Scale AI did for language models.
The same idea, from other directions. Figure runs a platform called Index that pays contributors to film first-person video of ordinary tasks to train its Helix models, according to Humanoids Daily. And the silk-embroidering hand was trained by a master embroiderer. Three very different projects share one input: skilled humans demonstrating a job.
The reframe. Robotics headlines focus on chips and valuations, but the scarce thing may be good demonstrations. Whoever collects the best examples of real work, from a line cook or a seamstress, shapes what robots can do and which jobs they reach first. If you do skilled work, your routine is already worth something to someone, and the industry is only starting to pay for it.
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This year AI shook up creative strategy. Most teams are still working like it didn't.
Ari Murray, Chief Digital Officer at Salt and Stone sits down with Bryan Harvey, Head of Brand at Hightouch, for an honest conversation about what's breaking on creative teams right now, how the roles are changing, and what a day looks like when creatives spend it on ideas, concepts, and craft while agents handle the manual execution.
Leave with new insights from 3 experts in the field and 5 prompts to instantly improve your creative output.
IN THE KNOW
A weather drone for the stratosphere. Swiss firm Meteomatics says its Strato multicopter reached 34,245 feet, a height weather balloons usually cover. The altitude is the company's own claim, and it hasn't disclosed battery, endurance or payload.
A robot for hazardous work. Minerva Humanoids' Roger is teleoperated, with the operator wearing a headset and haptic feedback. Its site lists emergency response and inspection work, but it names no customers or pilots.
Figure's compute deal. Figure's September agreement with Nscale targets access to up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, with first deployments planned for the second half of 2027, per eWeek. Nscale also plans an undisclosed equity investment.
The kitchen robot, priced. Vorwerk's Thermomix TM7 is $1,699 in the US and does chopping, steaming, weighing and guided cooking. The product page shows recipes and shopping lists through Cookidoo, which costs $65 a year after a 3-month trial, but doesn't mention ordering groceries.
PROMPT STATION
Find the one task worth automating. Most people automate whatever annoys them most. This prompt makes you price the task first, so you pick the one that pays back.
COPY AND PASTE THIS PROMPT
I run [YOUR BUSINESS]. Here are the repetitive tasks I do every week: [LIST 6 TO 10 TASKS WITH HOURS PER WEEK]. For each task, ask me how often it goes wrong, how much judgment it needs, and what a mistake costs. Then score each one from 1 to 5 on time saved, error risk and how easy it is to describe step by step. Rank the top three to automate first, and for the winner write the exact instructions I would give a human assistant to do it. End with how I would check the first 10 results by hand before trusting it.
Tip: include the task you dislike most even if it's rare. If it ranks low, you've saved yourself a project that wouldn't have paid back.