OpenAI Makes It Official: It’s Getting Into Robotics—but First, Helper Bots
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hopped on social media on June 1 to share some big news: the company is hiring for OpenAI Robotics. He’s looking for top-notch full-stack hardware, operations, systems, and machine learning engineers who want to code and build robots that actually make a difference in the real world.
Altman let it slip that OpenAI’s world simulation research project has grown like crazy over the past year and has now evolved into OpenAI Robotics. The team is led by Aditya Ramesh, and things are moving fast—the secret sauce? Deep integration and co-design between robotics hardware research and machine learning research.
MiniMax Rolls Out the M3 Model
June 1 update: MiniMax has launched its M3 model. According to the company, the model is built on its own MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA) architecture. The API supports a context window of up to 1M tokens, guaranteeing at least 512K tokens of usable context.
Jensen Huang: Unitree and NVIDIA Are Building a 1.8-Meter Humanoid Robot
On June 1, as reported by Hongxing News, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced a partnership with Unitree Robotics to launch a next-gen humanoid robot reference design called H2+—also known as the Isaac GR00T system. The goal? Speed up innovation across the global humanoid robot space. Huang said during his talk that the system is fully integrated. The robot has 31 degrees of freedom in its body, 25 degrees of freedom in each hand, stands about 1.8 meters tall, and weighs around 68 kilograms. He joked, “That’s pretty close to my own height and weight.”
Zhiyuan’s First Physical Store Lands in Shanghai on June 13
June 1 news: Zhiyuan’s first offline store on JD.com will officially open on June 13 at 3509 Caobao Road, Minhang District, Shanghai. The store is positioned as a “retail complex deployment” model, aiming for a full chain robot-led mode—from front-end shopping guides to back-end maintenance—so robots can literally “sell themselves.” Functionally, the store is set up with four main zones: a smart guide and shopping zone, a cyborg performance theater, a maker research space, and a smart logistics hub.
AGI Company VAST Nabs Nearly $200M in Series A Funding Rounds
Recently, general AI company VAST announced it closed its A+ and A++ financing rounds, totaling close to $200 million. The rounds were led by H Capital and China Life Yangtze River Delta Science and Technology Innovation Fund, joined by Shenzhen AI Terminal Industry Fund (whose industrial partner is global device giant Honor), well-known industrial strategic investors, Shanghai Semiconductor Industry Investment Fund, and others. Financial investors like Shenzhen Capital Group, Yunsheng Capital, Wochuang Venture Capital, and Fangguang Capital also participated. Meanwhile, existing investors such as Spring Capital, JINGYA Capital, BV Baidu Ventures, and Oriental Jiarong continued to over-subscribe. The capital will be used to recruit top-tier talent for AI 3D large models and general world models, iterate core algorithms, and build data assets, while also accelerating global market expansion and building out the industry ecosystem.
Ant Group, Didi, and Delian Lead Several Hundred Million Yuan in Funding for Jianzhi Robot
On June 1, embodied intelligence solution provider Jianzhi Robot announced it closed multiple consecutive funding rounds totaling several hundred million yuan. The rounds were led by Ant Group, Didi, and Delian Capital, with existing investors like Shunwei Capital, BV Baidu Ventures, and Jiusi Intelligence continuing to follow. According to Jianzhi Robot, this is the largest funding round to date in the embodied intelligence no-body data space.
NVIDIA Launches New AI Model: Nemotron 3 Ultra
On June 1, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the new AI model Nemotron 3 Ultra.
French Tech Firm Bull Teams Up with Hon Hai to Build AI and Cloud Infrastructure—Over €120M Initial Investment
According to a June 1 statement, French technology company Bull and Hon Hai will jointly manufacture AI and cloud infrastructure. The project will involve Bull’s facility in Angers, France, and Hon Hai’s plant in Pardubice, Czech Republic. Bull said the initial investment for executing this strategic deployment in France is expected to exceed €120 million.
