☕️ Good morning friends,

Yesterday we presented you with an Indian tiger quote in this spot, today it's about an Indian robot dog that's actually Chinese.

Pretty embarrassing story… 🙈

Also in today's issue:

• World Labs raises: Fei-Fei Li's startup raises $1 billion at $5 billion valuation

• Japan's iPS coup: World's first approved drugs based on iPS cells

• Samsung: New mode blocks copying, screenshots & forwarding

P.S. The German Chancellor is coming to China next week.

We curated an overview of his assessments on Germany's position between China, the US, and the rest of the world.

Samsung hits all-time high, KOSPI breaks 5,600: Samsung’s shares jumped by as much as 5.4% after reports emerged that the company plans to price its HBM4 chip at around $700, roughly 30% above the previous generation. South Korea’s KOSPI is already up 34% in 2026, making it the best-performing stock market in the world.

TOP BIT

Robot fake in India: university excluded from AI summit

An Indian university was kicked out of the prestigious AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Wednesday. A professor had passed off a commercially available robot dog from China as her own groundbreaking innovation.

India actually wanted to use the summit to present itself as a new AI superpower alongside the US and China. But then this happened:

• The fraud: A professor from Galgotias University proudly explained on state television that the robot dog "Orion" had been developed at their own center of excellence.

• The exposure: Internet users identified the machine as a Unitree Go2 within minutes.

• The consequence: The university had to clear its booth, power was cut, and India's IT minister hastily deleted his celebratory posts on X.

High-stakes summit becomes chaos stage

The "robo-lie" is particularly explosive because the summit was attended by the absolute world elite: Prime Minister Modi, Emmanuel Macron, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were on the guest list.

India is investing massively in "IndiaAI" to develop sovereign AI models and not be dependent on US tech giants.

The country wants to establish a "third way" between the US and China – with open-source models, 7,000 public datasets, and planned investments of $200 billion in data centers.

But the path is still rocky so far.

📊 All details & data: AP, BBC, CNBC

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MARKET BIT

Fei-Fei Li raises $1B: World Labs wants to bring AI from chat into the real world

Fei-Fei Li, known in the industry as the “Godmother of AI,” has raised $1 billion with her startup World Labs.

🤝 Rocket start: Li only founded World Labs in 2024. In September 2024, World Labs had already raised $230 million. Since then, the valuation has more than doubled. The new round values the company at around $5 billion.

The details

World Labs is developing “Spatial Intelligence”: AI that can understand and model the physical world in 3D. The first product is called Marble and generates interactive 3D worlds from images or text.

The round is led by Autodesk with $200 million alone, joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, AMD, Fidelity, and Singapore’s Sea Limited.

Who is Fei-Fei Li?

Born in Beijing and later moving to the United States, she is now a central voice in the U.S. AI scene.

She is one of the most influential researchers in modern AI, especially due to ImageNet, the dataset that massively accelerated computer vision in the 2010s.

Li previously served as Chief Scientist for AI/ML at Google Cloud before returning to Stanford and later launching World Labs.

Why everyone is betting on Spatial Intelligence

The thesis: AI must understand the physical world in 3D, not just process text and images. This opens up applications in robotics, AR/VR, and scientific simulation.

Meta’s chief scientist Yann LeCun is pursuing a similar approach with AMI Labs, and Google DeepMind is developing its own system called Genie. The participation of Singapore’s Sea Limited highlights the interest of Asian tech giants.

The investor logic: After the LLM boom, spatial intelligence will be the next growth market.

👉 Full Story: Bloomberg, AI Insider, Tech Funding News

HIGHLIGHTS 

🇯🇵 Japan’s iPS Breakthrough: Japan’s Ministry of Health has become the first in the world to approve drugs based on iPS cells. ReHeart is designed to treat severe heart failure, while Amchepry targets Parkinson’s disease. Twenty years after Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka’s discovery, the first commercial products based on this technology are now reaching the market.

🇺🇸 FDA Chief Warns of Losing Ground: FDA Commissioner Marty Makary says the U.S. is falling behind China in the pace of clinical trials. He cites hospital contracting, ethics reviews, and IND approvals as the main bottlenecks. China, meanwhile, benefits from strong state backing and faster regulatory processes within its biotech ecosystem.

🇰🇷 Samsung Locks Down Copy-Paste: Samsung has introduced a “Secure Chat” mode that technically blocks copying, forwarding, and screenshots. The move follows repeated leaks of internal meeting notes on anonymous platforms such as Blind. Crucially, the controls operate at the system level, not just through app policies or internal guidelines.

🇮🇳 Google Lays a Data Highway to India: Alphabet has announced the “America-India Connect” initiative, aiming to build new subsea fiber-optic routes between the U.S. and India. In parallel, Google has already committed $15 billion to an AI infrastructure hub in southern India. In addition, Google.org is allocating $60 million to support AI in public services and research.

BEHIND THE BITS

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You need to stay on top of things, but it's getting harder and harder to filter out exactly the info that's really relevant to you.

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• Founders, investors, experts, and entrepreneurs who are really making things happen.

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• Curated company data, dealflow, and research on robotics, advanced manufacturing, EV, and startups

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