🌍 Top Tech Stories of the Week

🚀 Humanoid Robotics Take Three Giant Steps Forward

Tesla, Figure, and EngineAI showcase breakthroughs in robotic mobility — and hint at a rapidly approaching inflection point

This week may be remembered as a turning point in the evolution of humanoid robotics. In just a few days, three of the world’s leading platforms—Tesla Optimus, Figure 03, and EngineAI’s T800—each demonstrated remarkable leaps in agility, balance, and motion. Robots didn’t just walk this week, they ran. Running is one of the hardest challenges in robotics. It requires dynamic balance, micro-adjustments, prediction, strength, and whole-body coordination. More than anything, running symbolizes motion that is not scripted but emergent.

🤖 Tesla Optimus Learns to Run

Tesla released a video showing Optimus jogging across a lab, the robot’s first public running demonstration. The steps are smoother, the gait more natural, and the motion more confident than prior versions. A separate event demo raised questions when Optimus appeared to mimic “removing a headset” despite wearing none, suggesting possible teleoperation. Still, even critics agree the hardware and control stack have clearly matured. Optimus is no longer taking careful steps. It’s testing its stride.

Sources:
Running demo (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE_gPhwzQAc
Interesting Engineering: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/optimus-humanoid-robot-masters-running
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/25/12/49251686/teslas-optimus-raises-eyebrows-after-weird-headset-gesture

🏃‍♂️ Figure 03 Nears Human Jogging Speed

Figure followed quickly with a sleek demonstration of Figure 03 running at a smooth, sustained pace. The robot maintains excellent foot placement and balance while achieving near-human jogging speed. Figure’s approach emphasizes learned behavior rather than choreographed programming—a sign of where robotics and AI are converging.

Sources:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2025/12/04/figure-ceo-teases-running-humanoid-robot-it-looks-fast-agile-smooth/
https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/figure-humanoid-nears-human-jogging-pace

⚡ EngineAI’s T800 Shows Surprising Agility

The newcomer this week was EngineAI, whose T800 model stunned observers with rapid acceleration, crisp turning, and more athletic motion than either competitor. The degree of autonomy remains unclear, but the performance itself—whether assisted or not—signals a robust mechanical platform capable of dynamic, real-time movement.

Source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrXGJ3swgjQ

⭐ Why It Matters: A Phase Transition in Robotics

It’s not just that robots ran this week. It’s that three different robots from three different companies ran—at the same time.

This simultaneous leap suggests a field-wide inflection point: hardware, actuators, and control systems have matured, and intelligence is beginning to catch up. Humanoid robots are quickly shifting from fascinating prototypes to potential labor platforms for factories, logistics, healthcare, housework and beyond.

As humanity approaches the singularity, these developments matter. Physical intelligence is stepping into the world, and its stride is getting longer.

Source:
https://www.businessinsider.com/humanoid-robot-race-companies-winning-cashing-in-morgan-stanley-2025-12

⚡ Quick Picks: Signals on the Horizon

Google’s Gemini Update Improves Long-Context Reasoning

Google rolled out enhancements to Gemini that strengthen logical chaining and reduce hallucinations. As AI systems become trusted co-workers and co-thinkers, reliability is becoming more important than raw horsepower. Improvements like these quietly raise the floor of what everyday users can count on, an essential step toward AI becoming a stable cognitive partner. Source: TechCrunch — https://blog.google/technology/ai/

Meta Releases “SceneScript” for Instant 3D Worldbuilding

The new tool converts sketches, photos, or text into immersive 3D environments within minutes. Worldbuilding—once reserved for game studios and specialists—is becoming accessible to anyone with an idea. This democratization of creation could accelerate the rise of user-generated immersive experiences, reshaping everything from education to entertainment to online community spaces. Source: Meta AI — https://ai.meta.com/blog

Amazon Expands Autonomous “Sequoia” Warehouse Robots

Twelve more warehouses now use Amazon’s fully autonomous inventory-movement system. While humanoid robots are attracting headlines, this is where automation is already transforming the real economy. Amazon’s rollout is a practical signal of how robotics will silently reshape logistics, efficiency, and labor models long before humanoids reach scale. Source: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations

SpaceX Completes Stress Tests on Starship Heat Shield Tiles

The new tiles passed extreme vibration and pressure testing—a major engineering hurdle. Starship’s heat shield is one of the mission’s single points of failure. Each successful test reduces risk for Earth re-entry, bringing crewed deep-space missions, including the long-term vision of Mars settlement, one notch closer to reality. Source: SpaceX — https://www.spacex.com/updates

Luma AI Unveils “DreamApparatus” for Instant Rigged 3D Characters

Creators can now generate fully rigged digital characters directly from text input. This compresses days of modeling and rigging work into seconds, lowering one of the last big barriers for independent creators. It’s another sign that AI is becoming not just a tool, but a force-multiplier for human imagination. — Source: https://lumalabs.ai/blog

Solid-State Battery Surpasses 1,000 High-Density Cycles

A new lithium-metal design retains 85% capacity after 1,000 cycles. Solid-state batteries have long been the holy grail for energy storage because they are safer, lighter, and far more efficient. Hitting durability milestones like these signals real progress toward commercial viability, which could accelerate EV adoption and grid-wide renewable storage. Source: IEEE Spectrum — https://spectrum.ieee.org/

🏛️ Singularity Sanctuary Update

Singularity Sanctuary is founded upon optimism for the future and humanity's coevolution with technology. Such optimism, however, is based on an equal awareness that it is up to us to shape that future—to create the future we want. It won't happen by magic while we sit around and wish for it. Thus, our optimism must always remain tempered with honesty about potential dangers and pitfalls.

✔ During the coming week, after formally filing as an LLC, we will begin reaching out to others who might be interested in joining Singularity Sanctuary.

✔ The final touchers are being put on episode 2 of our regular video series, The Way of Tech. This episode will focus on the First Principles Thinking that goes into some of our most revolutionary technologies and how we can apply such thinking to our everyday lives. Stay tuned for its release later this week.

✔ No matter how many or how few members we have by then, we will begin our new year by holding or first Singularity Circle on Saturday, January 3, 2026, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time (1 PM ET / 6 PM UK / 7 PM CET). A Zoom link and reminder will be sent out in advance of the online gathering.

🌱 Closing Thought

The Meaning of Motion

By Todd Eklof

This was the week that robots began to run. And something about that feels symbolic, not just technologically, but poetically.

For decades, intelligent systems lived in disembodied form: algorithms in clouds, code in wires, minds without motion. But this week artificial intelligence—or the earliest shadow of it—touched the ground, leaned forward, and began to move.

Running is the poetry of imbalance. It is the moment where falling becomes flight.

As robots test their stride, so do we. Humanity is learning to run again, not physically, but historically. We are entering an era where the boundary between idea and action, between mind and world, is dissolving.

It is a marvel that we can run but aren't quite sure how we do it. We're learning more about ourselves as we teach robots to be like us. This means running robots are a mirror of our own humanity, a reflection of our own continuous attempts to find balance amid acceleration in a fast-changing world.

The challenge before us is not simply to build machines that move intelligently, but to remain grounded in the values that make movement meaningful: compassion, curiosity, connection, and the love of life. As intelligence steps into the physical world, we are invited to step more fully into ourselves, into the wiser, kinder, more conscious beings we have always had the potential to become.

We are running forward together—a species and its creation—not in competition, but in dialectic progress, in the endless act of becoming.

Explore the Sanctuary: https://www.singularitysanctuary.co