Figure melts its old robots as Tesla builds a plant for 10 million a year

1. Tesla lines up $30B, chips and a plant for 10 million Optimus a year

It started on Tuesday with $30B of undrawn credit in an SEC filing; on Thursday Musk halved the AI5 chip's memory to get enough of them for Optimus (nudging it back up to 96GB the next morning), as drone footage showed the 10-million-a-year Optimus plant going up at Giga Texas. It peaked on Saturday, when Tesla pushed Austin Robotaxi hours to 11 PM at the end of Cybercab's first month.

What stuck: Musk on why the cars still stop at night: "Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark" (7.7M views), and @DavidSHolz on the plant: "enough physical labor to build New York City in 5 months". The counter was @ChuckCook on the loan: "Sounds like something an airline would do in lean times."

Tesla's cars no longer pay for its bets, so it's borrowing to build robot capacity before it has a finished robot or an outside buyer: most of the money has to be drawn by early 2028, which puts the big spend in 2027, and Tesla's own factories are the first customer. The gap is the robot itself: its AI still can't reliably handle a broad range of tasks, so the plant may be ready before Optimus is.

Heat: 26.8M views, 396 posts · 7 days in the news · no Reddit thread

2. Figure melts its F.02s in a Finnish furnace

Brett Adcock posted "Goodbye F.02" on Monday, and on Wednesday the film landed: retired F.02s, trained in simulation, jumped on their own into a 75-ton arc furnace in Finland, an idea that started with Arnold Schwarzenegger on X, and the metal is sold as souvenirs. It kept spreading all week, with Chinese and Spanish reposts passing 1.3M views each.

What stuck: Schwarzenegger's "Hasta la vista, F.02." and r/singularity's "made their older gen robots jump to their death" (619 pts). The counter got traction too: r/singularity's first thread asked "what's the point", and @DeryaTR_ wrote "This wasn't cool."

Figure now treats each robot generation as disposable: it would rather melt a fleet that once worked BMW's line than pull engineers off F.04, because the model and the data are what it owns. The film was aimed at households, the people it pays to film their chores and will one day sell robots to, so Figure is building a consumer brand before it has anything to sell them. Annoying that we got a stunt and still no date for F.04.

Heat: 9.0M views, 204 posts · 6 days in the news · 619 pts on r/singularity

3. Dyna's Taku runs a laundry room alone for an hour

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Teased on Monday and launched on Tuesday, Dyna-2.1 came with Taku, a wheeled semi-humanoid Dyna built itself, and uncut footage of it running a hotel-style laundry room alone for an hour. New tasks take 30 minutes to two hours of data, and Dyna says customer sites come next.

What stuck: @Rewkang: "We are entering the agentic era of robotics", the jump co-founder Jason Ma compared to coding going from autocomplete to agents. The counter was about size and speed, led by r/singularity's top reply: "Great now I just need a laundry room the size of my living room!"

Dyna has concluded that one reliable task doesn't sell at scale, so it now builds its own robot and rents it out for a whole hotel job, betting against the labs that sell only the brain. Speed is the wrong worry: the test Dyna set itself is how long Taku runs with nobody watching. Past the one uncut hour, it hasn't published that number, while a European rival posted every intervention the same week.

Heat: 3.9M views, 170 posts · 4 days in the news · 85 pts on r/singularity

4. Boston Dynamics gives Atlas a four-finger hand

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A day after a film pitching Atlas to factories on a two-year payback, Boston Dynamics showed its new hand on Thursday: four fingers, 13 degrees of freedom, a motor in every joint and touch sensors, built to be simulated exactly and made 100,000 a year. Clone showed a five-finger muscle-and-tendon hand the same evening.

What stuck: @AutismCapital: "It's over boys. We had a good run" (286K views), and the engineers who spent a day with their pinkies taped to their ring fingers before cutting the finger. The counter came from Figure on Saturday: Brett Adcock is "bullish on embracing the complexity and building really capable human-like hands" for F.04.

Boston Dynamics now designs Atlas backwards from a car plant and a simulator: every part has to earn its cost on a production line and be modelled exactly, so the robot can learn its jobs by trial and error in simulation. The catch is the wait, with the only tool demo still teleoperated and Atlas's first real job at Hyundai, sorting parts, not starting until 2028.

Heat: 1.7M views, 134 posts · 4 days in the news · 90 pts on r/singularity