Japan to Buy 27,500 Rubin Chips for a Homegrown Robotics AI Model

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Japan to Buy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin Chips for a Homegrown Robotics AI Model

Japan plans to purchase 27,500 of Nvidia's next-generation Rubin AI chips to build a homegrown robotics foundation model. The newly formed Noetra will run a large data center and plans to release its first AI model in March 2027, iterating from there toward models aimed at robotics applications. Noetra has secured ¥387.3 billion in Japanese government backing through March 2027, and is operated by dozens of companies including SoftBank- and Toyota-backed Preferred Networks and NEC.

Sources: 36kr.com

Model Releases

Force Lingji Releases DW0.5: A World Model That Coaches VLAs

Force Lingji released DW0.5, moving reinforcement learning into a virtual world and using a world model to coach VLA models. The company says real-robot data requirements in post-training drop by 60% as a result.

Sources: qbitai.com

Stardust Intelligence Releases the Embodied Foundation Model Lumo-2

Stardust Intelligence released Lumo-2, an embodied foundation model that makes robot motion faster and more accurate. Its approach — "find the most likely outcome within the probabilities" — has been likened to robots developing a sixth sense.

Sources: ifanr.com

German Consortium Open-Sources Soofi S: 31.6B Total, Only 3.2B Active

A German research consortium released the open-source language model Soofi S, trained entirely on German domestic compute. The model uses a resource-efficient hybrid architecture with 31.6B total parameters but only 3.2B active per token. With a heavy emphasis on German training data, Soofi S outperforms other fully open models such as Olmo 3 on both English and German benchmarks.

Sources: the-decoder.com · r/LocalLLaMA

NVIDIA Nemotron-3-Puzzle-75B-A9B Runs 262K Context on Two 3090s

Community testing shows that with W4A16 quantization, NVIDIA Nemotron-Labs-3-Puzzle-75B-A9B runs on 2× RTX 3090 with the full 262K context (N=4). The quantized build was published on Hugging Face by community member danielrmay.

Sources: huggingface.co · r/LocalLLaMA

Dev Tools & Ecosystem

OpenAI Resets Everyone's Quota Overnight; 8M Developers Get a Reprieve

OpenAI product lead Thibault Sottiaux announced that Codex and ChatGPT Work active users have reached 8 million, and that usage quotas would be reset for everyone again, with the 5-hour rate limit still lifted. It is his third quota move in 72 hours.

Sources: leiphone.com

WordPress 7.0 Ships With Platform-Level AI Infrastructure

WordPress 7.0 — the open-source CMS behind a large share of the web — shipped with platform-level AI infrastructure, a redesigned admin, and new design tools for the block editor. Named after jazz legend Louis Armstrong, it landed on May 20, 2026 after missing its original April 9 target, led by Matias Ventura. The headline change is built-in AI: an AI client and the Abilities API.

Sources: infoq.cn

Products & Applications

FAW's Industry Model Lands on Alibaba Cloud Bailian, Open to All

China FAW and Alibaba Cloud announced that FAW's Qwen-based automotive industry model is now on the Bailian platform and open to the whole industry — the first industry model to reach commercial service. Trained on high-quality datasets spanning FAW's full chain of R&D, production, manufacturing and supply chain, it went through eight rounds of iteration, turning industry know-how into a standardized service.

Sources: leiphone.com

Kingsoft Office Launches Two AI Office Agents

At its "2026 AI Productivity Conference" in Shanghai on July 15, Kingsoft Office launched two AI office agents: Lingxi Pro for individuals and WPS Comate for organizations. CEO Zhang Qingyuan said office software is entering its third era — from standalone, to collaborative, to AI-native.

Sources: 36kr.com

Tech & Insights

SJTU's 3D Auto-Labeling Work Lands an ICML 2026 Oral

The bottleneck in 3D spatial data was never the algorithm — it was labeling. Holi-Spatial, built by an all-Chinese team, reaches 81.06% accuracy on ScanNet++ without lidar and without human labeling. The paper was selected for an ICML 2026 Oral.

Sources: leiphone.com

Industry News

ModelBest's MiniCPM to Ship on Samsung Phones

ModelBest has struck a deal with Samsung to ship its in-house MiniCPM on-device models across several flagship Samsung phones. The same day, Chinese regulators announced that 7 on-device generative AI services completed filing — including Apple Intelligence, Huawei Xiaoyi, OPPO AndesGPT, vivo BlueLM, Xiaomi HyperAI and Samsung Galaxy AI.

Sources: 36kr.com

Indian AI Coding Startup Emergent Raises $130M at a $1.5B Valuation

Indian AI coding startup Emergent closed a $130 million Series C at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation, led by private equity firm Creaegis, with new investors including MNI Ventures-Claypond and Sentinel Global. The company has reached a $120 million annualized revenue run rate and more than 200,000 paying customers — just over a year after launch.

Sources: techcrunch.com

Linux Foundation Launches Akrites With 20+ Founding Members

The Linux Foundation launched Akrites, an industry-wide initiative to protect the world's most critical open-source software against fast-evolving AI-driven cyber threats. It has backing from over 20 founding organizations, including AWS, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, NVIDIA, IBM, Red Hat, Cisco, Chainguard, Sonatype and several global financial institutions.

Sources: infoq.cn

Outlook & Rumors

Apple in Talks With PrismML to Shrink Models Onto the iPhone

Per CNBC, Apple is in talks with Silicon Valley startup PrismML, which says it can compress powerful AI models to run on phones. PrismML is a Caltech spinout backed by Khosla Ventures and has publicly released compressed models. CEO Babak Hassibi told CNBC that Apple and other companies have been evaluating the startup's models.

Sources: cnbc.com · r/LocalLLaMA