Sharp has introduced a new model of its "Pocketomo" conversational AI robot - and the defining design choice is that it won't fully agree with you. The character is intentionally designed to push back, express boredom, and decline to validate. In a product category defined by helpfulness and positive reinforcement, this is a deliberate inversion worth examining.
25/08/2026 à 16h23 10 11
MIT Technology Review sent a correspondent to a humanoid robot event in Shanghai described as a "carnival" - and the BBC profiled Chinese factory workers saying "I went to sleep, and the world changed." The picture that emerges isn't of a country racing to catch up. It's of an industry that has already moved from benchmark competition to volume deployment and public demonstration.
25/08/2026 à 16h23 4 5
Chinese automaker Chery is preparing to spin its robotics unit out for a public listing. Following Unitree and Alibaba/JD.com's robot maker, three Chinese robotics IPOs in one quarter marks a phase change.
19/08/2026 à 22h31 12 16
Two parallel Beijing expos this week showcase the physical humanoid stack alongside the foundation-model stack that runs it - the vertical integration is now the marketing message, not the roadmap.
19/08/2026 à 22h31 11 13
Shenhai Zhiren, backed by BYD, has raised 500 million yuan and launched SEAgent 1.0 - an underwater AI agent model. The vertical foundation model trend is extending into environments where general-purpose models simply cannot operate.
14/08/2026 à 18h58 8 7
To launch Apple Intelligence in China, Apple built a custom model with Alibaba. This isn't just product localization - it's a case study in what AI sovereignty compliance actually costs at scale.
14/08/2026 à 18h58 7 8
Tencent becomes Manus's dominant shareholder as a reported Meta deal unravels - a pivot that embeds the autonomous agent startup inside the WeChat ecosystem and raises a concrete question: where does AI agent distribution value actually sit?
13/08/2026 à 20h44 8 9
NEC is building an organization where AI managers generate AI worker agents on demand and assign them roles. Japan's enterprise AI story just got more radical than expected.
10/08/2026 à 16h32 10 12
Ford's AI assistant in its mobile app handles fuel levels and tire pressure queries. It's a narrow use case - but it's AI doing a useful job in the physical world, at consumer scale.
10/08/2026 à 16h30 10 11
Saregama, India's oldest music label, is generating music videos for its archive of pre-video-era songs using GenAI. It's a concrete, revenue-driven AI deployment - not a demo - and it points to where AI and cultural archives intersect.
06/08/2026 à 11h01 7 7
Kakao has made its AI strategy explicit: build AI-native services on top of third-party models, not compete on foundation models. For a company with 45M+ users and deep platform distribution, this is the correct call.
06/08/2026 à 11h00 8 10
Two of Japan's biggest system integrators confirmed AI demand traction on their earnings. ITmedia reads it as the vindication of the Nvidia-centric stack.
03/08/2026 à 13h23 14 10
