Microduck nears 20,000 preorders after Jensen's keynote, as programmers upgrade their rubber ducks

Nothing big in the last 24 hours. Here's what led.

Microduck heads for 20,000 preorders after Jensen's keynote, and Pollen says the demo was piloted

New since the GTC Berlin keynote: the $399 duck robots are selling fast (@mikekalilmfg), with preorders going from just over 15,000 on keynote day to nearly 20,000 (Clem Delangue expected to cross 20,000 on 23 Oct). New orders won't arrive before Christmas, probably in the first quarter of 2027. Pollen Robotics' Rémi Fabre counts 60M+ views on the demo and says ducks are selling faster than at launch, but each duck on stage had an engineer piloting it, sending commands to moves trained with reinforcement learning. Out of the box, it won't be an autonomous companion.

Mostly delight. @ClementDelangue is hiring "in all functions" for "the explosion of Microduck and Reachy Mini", and warned buyers about scam websites. On r/robotics: "I think this is a phenomenal toy for children to learn how reinforcement learning works... Too bad the economy is fucked and $400 is a lot to spend these days."

Heat: medium · 271K views, 41 posts · #1 on r/robotics

1. Unitree's shares hit their daily limit as it says up to 20,000 G1s have been built

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At its partner conference on 22 October, Unitree said 10,000 to 20,000 G1 humanoids have come off the line (@KuCoin_Web3). On Friday its shares rose the 20% daily limit for the first time, up 54% over six trading days (@followin_io_zh). Founder Wang Xingxing expects humanoids to succeed 80% of the time when told to do something by 2028, crediting models like GPT-6 (@rohanpaul_ai).

Few takes outside the market. @clankrmedia calls it "One of the biggest milestones in humanoid robotics", while @followin_io_zh notes that the H2-X video's autonomy and sales are still unproven.

Heat: low · 57K views, 18 posts · quiet on Reddit

Robocurve: language models driving real robot arms double their score every 54 days

In "The Bitter Lesson Comes to Robotics", Robocurve finds that frontier language models controlling real robots doubled their score on its RoboDojo-RC Tier 1 benchmark every 53.9 days from July to October, while getting 4.4x faster and 6.2x cheaper. They rarely get stuck: they fail by running out of actions or by an unrecoverable error, like Opus 5.5 squeezing a pen cap until it shot off the table (@robocurve). It matters because general-purpose models are quickly catching up with models built for robots (Dream-1 still leads this benchmark, 59 to 48) (@chooi_jeq).

Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 9% on Robocurve's real-robot tasks

In a rapid-response eval of 120 runs, all released with transcripts and videos (@robocurve), Moonshot's new model trails Opus 5.5, Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-6 Astra, though it beats Astra and Argon on Terminal-Bench (@chooi_jeq). It matters because a model can match the best at coding and still fail with a real robot, which only real-robot tests show.