yev

Humanoids are the next platform. Watching it get built.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

17 seconds of a humanoid robot doing kung fu in a public square in China.

Only 1 question matters to me:

Is someone off-camera holding a controller?

If it's teleoperated, it's a puppet with great balance.
If it's autonomous, it's a policy that learned footwork on stone tiles.

The video looks the same either way. The company would be worth something very different.

I build AI agents and trading bots, and I can't tell from the footage.

Your call: puppet or policy? What gave it away?

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

Robot dance clips get written off as gimmicks. That routine is the hardest thing happening in the video.

23 seconds of deep squats, spins and one-leg weight shifts, on a 35 kg machine that sells for $13,500.

Staying upright while your own momentum keeps changing is the exact problem that keeps robots out of warehouses.

Choreography hides the benchmark. The dance is the test.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

Someone glued a fake fur tail onto a $1,600 robot dog, and that's the entire adoption story.

The tail does nothing. No sensor, no balance, 0 function.

It turns a surveillance-shaped machine into a pet. People let pets walk past them.

Years of engineering went into the gait. The costume-shop tail did more for acceptance than any of it.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

666 teams brought 2,056 robots to Beijing and the most honest thing in the arena was a hand.

One hovering 1 meter behind every humanoid, thumb on a controller, all day, every run.

I ship AI agents. Mine have that hand too. It's me, reading logs at midnight.

The leash gets shorter every month. It has never been zero.

Anyone whose agent ran a full week untouched — I want to hear how.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

LOOK AT THE FLOOR. THAT ROBOT IS PLUGGED INTO A WALL.

The face is real work: 3D-printed silicone skin over micro-motors, expressions you'd read as human at 2 metres.
The hands gesture. The head turns. The feet never leave a 1 metre platform, and a thick cable runs off it to mains power.

China builds roughly 85% of the world's humanoids right now, and most of them are still performative rather than functional.

the honest catch: an expressive face is genuinely hard, and this company has been solving it since 2021. It just isn't the same problem as work.

The cable is the review. Every thing above it is the trailer.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

500 KG OF WALKING MACHINE, AND THE PILOT ISN'T WEARING A HELMET.

Look at the cockpit. An open cage bolted into the torso, a lap harness, a man in a dress shirt, and a street with parked cars behind him.
2.8 metres tall. 500 kg with him inside. High-strength alloy, high-torque motors, and legs that carry all of it over pavement.

now imagine it takes 1 bad step.

the honest catch: Unitree classifies it as a civilian vehicle and it's going into mass production. Nobody has said which rules apply to it.

We built the mech before we built the seatbelt law.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

NOBODY TAUGHT THIS ROBOT TO DO A CARTWHEEL. IT DOWNLOADED ONE.

The side flip and the kip-up you're watching are reinforcement learning policies. Trained in simulation, shipped as versioned motion releases, same as a firmware update.
No choreographer on set. No 40 takes. A file lands, the machine can suddenly do a thing it couldn't do last month.

now watch the ground. Wet asphalt, loose rock, a slope. Not a studio floor.

the honest catch: a downloaded move is still a move somebody had to train, and most of them fail in sim thousands of times first.

Robots used to learn like animals. Now they update like phones.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

IT HIT 12.66 M/S, FASTER THAN BOLT EVER MOVED. THEN IT WENT INTO AN ELECTRICAL BOX.

10 metres in 0.79 seconds, timed on screen. Bolt peaked at 12.42 m/s in Berlin in 2009, and he's the fastest human who has ever lived.
Legs 0.85 m long. A 2 m standing jump the same night. Just over 3 months from first sketch to this.

Then it came off the curve with nowhere to put the energy.

the honest catch: none of this is independently verified, and the founder calls the prototype unfinished.

Acceleration is a spec. Stopping is engineering.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

THE MOST POPULAR ROBOT ARM ON EARTH CAME OUT OF ONE WORKSHOP IN FRANCE.

That's Rob Knight's desk. An old iMac, a pile of servos, a business card taped to the wall behind the monitor.
He's been building hands off human anatomy for over 20 years, back when the whole field was convinced the hard problem was walking.

The arm he drew with Hugging Face, the SO-100, starts near $100 in parts and ships under Apache 2.0. Their CEO called it one of the most popular robot arms ever made.

the honest catch: a $100 arm teaches. It doesn't lift anything you'd care about.

Everyone raced to build legs. He spent 20 years on fingers.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

$20,000 OR $499 A MONTH. AND A HUMAN MAY BE DRIVING THAT HAND.

1X starts shipping NEO to homes in the US and Canada this half. Onboard autonomy covers the basics, scheduled teleoperation covers the rest.
So a person in an office somewhere can be looking through your kitchen while the robot lifts your glass.

now watch the fingers on the grape. That's either a model or an operator, and the video won't tell you which.

the honest catch: 1X says this out loud. It's in the product, not buried in a footnote.

The grip is solved. The question is whose hand is inside it.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

CHINA'S 50 KG ROBOT DOG GOES THROUGH THE DOOR FIRST. THAT'S THE POINT MAN'S JOB.

A PLA instructor said it without decoration: these machines go where human troops are most vulnerable.
76th Group Army, field exercises in the hills of northern China, quadrupeds moving with infantry squads.
The heavy one clears 50 kg, carries a QBZ-95, and leads the assault once a building is breached.

now watch the clip again and count the humans. Every one of them is behind it.

the honest catch: a concrete range with paper targets is not a room with someone waiting in it.

No army automated the general first. They started with the man at the front.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

THE FIRST JOB ROBOTS TAKE PAYS $0 AN HOUR.

Everyone argues about truckers and warehouses. The demo that actually landed this year is a machine putting glasses in a dishwasher.
Roughly 1,000 hours a year, unpaid, no contract, no severance, nobody to file a grievance with.

There's no employer to lobby against this. No headcount to defend. No union that covers a kitchen at 10pm.

now watch the glasses go in, one per hand, 2 at a time.

the honest catch: $20,000 is a target and not a price, and this thing still can't cook, tidy, or watch a kid.

The work with no paycheck has nobody to defend it.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

HINA'S ARMED ROBOT WOLF DOES OVER 6 METERS A SECOND. THE SAME FACTORY SELLS YOU ONE FOR $1,600.

Unitree ships the Go2 to anyone with a credit card at $1,600. $2,800 for the Pro. Around $13,000 for the wheeled one.
The military build, the AS2-W, adds 150 TOPS of onboard compute, a 128-line lidar, 80 cm obstacles, 45-degree slopes.

now watch it cross that hillside.

No water at 40 degrees. No blisters. No 18 years of raising it first.

the honest catch: nobody has shot at one yet. The clip's own narrator admits durability is unproven.

The gun was never the scary part. The price tag is.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

IT TOOK 50,000 ROUNDS TO KILL ONE ENEMY IN VIETNAM. THE SNIPERS NEEDED 1.39.

That gap is the whole history of small arms in 2 numbers.
Every program since has tried to buy the sniper's number for everybody else.

A dumb 155mm shell runs about $3,000. The guided version has been quoted between $68,000 and $112,800.
The Army's new fire-control optic lands near $10,800 a unit and does the ballistics for you.

now watch the clip.

It stands flat-footed and fires. No lean, no breath, no flinch. The round finds the target on its own.

the honest catch: guided costs 20 to 40 times more, so nobody sprays it.

Marksmanship used to be a skill. Now it ships inside the ammunition.

[yev @yev099]

A HUMAN INTERN BEAT THE BEST SORTING ROBOT BY 192 PACKAGES.

10 hours, head to head, live on stream.
Human: 12,924 packages, 2.79 seconds each.
Robot: 12,732 packages, 2.83 seconds each.

0.04 seconds per package. That's the whole gap a $39 billion company is still closing.

The one in this clip skipped the race and took a job. It stands at a China Post hub that pushes 6.5 million parcels a day.

the honest catch: it's a torso bolted to a stand. It can't walk to the next station.

The intern wins the shift. The robot wins the decade.

[yev @yev099]

𝟮 𝗞𝗜𝗗𝗦 𝗪𝗔𝗧𝗖𝗛𝗘𝗗 𝗔 𝗥𝗢𝗕𝗢𝗧 𝗗𝗢 𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗜𝗥 𝗟𝗔𝗨𝗡𝗗𝗥𝗬. 𝗕𝗔𝗥𝗘𝗙𝗢𝗢𝗧, 𝗙𝗥𝗢𝗠 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗗𝗢𝗢𝗥𝗪𝗔𝗬.

now watch the last 3 seconds of the clip.

a figure 02 is holding a laundry basket in 1 hand and feeding an electrolux with the other. nobody in the room is nervous.

somebody says, "honey, you want to throw that in there?"

then a voice off camera, to the kid: "hopefully you never have to do laundry every day."

figure started alpha testing in real homes 2 years ahead of its own schedule.

that kid is growing up thinking laundry is something robots do.

[yev @yev099]

𝟭𝟯 𝗦𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗗𝗦. 𝟭 𝗣𝗜𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗟. 𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝟭 𝗙𝗟𝗔𝗚 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗗𝗢𝗘𝗦𝗡'𝗧 𝗙𝗜𝗧.

I pulled 28 frames out of this clip. 4 details.

1. It shoots from a low crouch and never stands up. People stand up. Machines don't have to.
2. A human instructor watches from the left with his own weapon down.
3. At 8 seconds a drone shot shows the whole shoot house — mud, walls, catwalk.
4. Japanese flag on the left shoulder.

Number 4 is the one that breaks. Japan's Defense Ministry ruled out weapons that pick and engage targets without a person in the loop. Their line: only a human can be held accountable.

Somebody put a flag on a robot that the flag says shouldn't exist.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

𝗔 𝟯𝟱 𝗸𝗴 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗱𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗹𝗮𝘇𝘆.

Watched this split screen 15 times. 4 things stood out.

1. The real ones get up faster than the movie ones. No drama, no 8-count.
2. Every punch is a human on a controller. The robot only handles balance.
3. That's a real MMA cage. Nobody built a set for it.
4. The crowd films it on phones. In 2011 that detail was the sci-fi part.

Real Steel put its story in 2020. China ran the actual tournament on May 25, 2025, live on state TV, 4 teams, 3 rounds of 2 minutes.

The sequel got made. Just not in California.

[yev @yev099]

I watched this roofing robot 20 times. 4 things stood out.

1. It shifts weight before it reaches. Balance first, work second.
2. The hose never tangles once in 12 seconds.
3. It never looks at its own hands.
4. Zero people on the roof. Zero safety lines.

Number 3 is the one that matters. Humans check their grip constantly, every few seconds, without thinking.

A machine that never doubts its hands is either perfect or fake.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz

[yev @yev099]

THIS ROBOT IS WEARING THE SHOP'S UNIFORM. ABOUT 200 HUMANOIDS ON EARTH DO PAID WORK. THIS IS WHAT NUMBER 201 LOOKS LIKE.

Every humanoid clip you have seen this year was filmed in a showroom, a lab or a stage. Clean floor, good light, a crowd watching.

now look at this floor.

Oil stains. A spare tire on its side. Aerosol cans knocked over next to the jack post. A rolling cart with a red impact wrench on it. And a humanoid standing at the wheel hub of a car on the lift.

Now look at its back. Navy work vest. The garage's name stitched across it.

Nobody dressed it up for a demo. They gave it a uniform.

A humanoid costs somewhere between $11 and $15 an hour to run. A technician doing the same shift costs $30 to $45.

The honest catch: one clip is not a shift. I do not know how long it worked, how much a human redid after it, or whether someone was driving it from off camera.

But every robot video for the last five years was an audition.

This one is wearing a name tag.

[yev @yev099]

https://t.co/yaMdN3Xkqz