Week of October 27, 2025

November 1, 2025 0 reads

Neo Humanoid Robot

This week 1x unveiled Neo, the first consumer humanoid robot that actually has a buy button on it's website. Neo is on sale for $20k or available for $500 per month, and 1x plans to ship starting in 2026. Neo can perform household chores and act as a personal assistant, but will only be partly autonomous and assisted by remote human teleoperators.

Substrate Chip Foundry

Substrate, backed by Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, came out of stealth with the vision to build an American semiconductor foundry. Substrate plans to start in the lithography space, competing with ASML, and ultimately work their way up the stack to build a modern, vertically integrated American chip foundry.

Amazon Layoffs, Project Rainier, AWS Growth,

Amazon announced 30,000 corporate layoffs, Project Rainier (a new AI data center with 500k Trainium2 chips), and had a massive earnings beat with AWS revenue growth accelerating to 20.2%.

Extropic Thermodynamic Computing

Extropic launched their thermodynamic compute hardware with the potential to transform AI training and provide massive improvements in energy efficiency relative to GPUs. Extropic also released an open source library for simulating their hardware: thrml on GitHub.

Boston Debates Ban of Autonomous Vehicles

The Boston City council met with Waymo to debate regulations and a proposed ordinance preventing operation of autonomous vehicles. This debate feels like a canary in the coal mine for the rise of Neo-Luddism in the wake of AI and robotic acceleration.

Board Gaming Device

Brynn Putnam, founder of Mirror (now Lululemon Studio, acquired in 2020), announced Board, a new collaborative gaming device.