Morning Edition · Friday, July 3, 2026
BMW puts Figure's humanoid robot on real logistics work at its South Carolina plant
Figure 03 takes on parts sequencing after its predecessor spent nearly a year in the body shop, a measured step for embodied AI in production.
BMW has deployed Figure AI's Figure 03 humanoid at its Spartanburg plant for parts sequencing, in which unsorted components arriving in bulk containers are picked, sorted, and placed into trolleys that are delivered to the assembly line in…
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Robotics Foundation Models for Embodied AI
Over the coming months, labs ship general-purpose robotics model suites that bridge vision-language understanding to physical navigation and manipulation, pushing foundation models into embodied action.
More from this edition
- Claude Sonnet 5 arrives, and the mid-tier model now outscores Anthropic's own top model on agentic coding
- OpenAI proposes handing the United States government a 5 percent stake, worth about 42 billion dollars
- Fable 5 returns from shutdown with safety classifiers developers say now block ordinary code
- Google's electricity use rose 37 percent in 2025 as its AI buildout grew faster than the power grid
- NVIDIA seeks outside capital to fund the shift from training to always-on inference
- Inference-cost pressure produces both a serving paper and a prompt-stripping trend
- Meta's Brain2Qwerty advances non-invasive brain-to-text, though fidelity limits remain
- Agentic AI led to many new apps, but the Financial Times finds little user traction
- Anthropic releases Claude Science, a workbench that prioritizes workflow rather than a new model
- A cluster of new papers targets the widening gap between agent capability and agent oversight
- Segment Anything quietly powers a consumer app, a marker of promptable vision reaching production