bring

China will bring together more than 300 humanoid robots in a half marathon. The goal goes beyond running

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Seeing more than 300 humanoid robots preparing to run a half marathon in Beijing has something of a futuristic image, yes, but also quite a declaration of intentions. The appointment, scheduled for April 19 within the framework of The Beijing Yizhuang Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in 2026 is not presented as a simple flashy exhibition, but as an event in which China will bring together dozens of brands, teams and systems to test them before the public. What we have before us is not just a race: it is another way of showing us to what extent humanoid robotics has become an area that the country wants to take very seriously. New edition. Last year, Beijing had already held a half marathon of humanoid robotsbut now the leap is evident: preparation has mobilized dozens of teams and has forced the organization of large-scale night tests to check that everything works on the ground. Xinhua reported that more than 70 teams participated in the last comprehensive test held between the night of April 11 and the early hours of the 12th. More than resistance. The interesting thing about this appointment is not only in seeing which robot can withstand the distance better, but in observing how it travels it. Both autonomous navigation and remote control equipment participated in the previous tests, which will allow different technical architectures to be shown. That nuance matters a lot, because it shifts the focus from the simple spectacular image to something more useful for reading the moment of humanoid robotics in China. What is at stake is not only completing the journey, but also checking what degree of autonomy and what type of control can be sustained in an open environment. The names of this edition. If there are robots that help to better read the level of this appointment, those are the ones that arrive with clearer objectives and a more recognizable profile. The Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center has confirmed the participation of Tiangong Ultra and Tiangong 3.0, with three units of the former competing completely autonomously, without human navigators or external guidance signals. Unitree has also confirmed the return of the H1, in a version adapted for long distances. Added to this is the presence of Lightning and Yuqi Boy, the two models with which Honor enters this race. What China wants to teach. This race can also be read in a much broader way. It is not only about seeing dozens of humanoid robots facing a half marathon, but also about interpreting the message that China projects with that image. Humanoid robotics has become one of the areas in which the country wants to make its position clear.. And few formulas are as effective to do so as taking that bet out of the laboratory, turning it into a public event and showing it on a stage capable of attracting attention inside and outside its borders. Images | Beijing Government In Xataka | Anthropic was the “don’t be evil” of AI for developers. Now he’s squeezing them all

give reasons to bring back teleworking

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When the price of oil soars Because of a war, governments look for ways to reduce their consumption. This is something that already happened with the oil crisis of ’73 and it is being repeated again with the war between Iran, Israel and the US. One of the quickest is usually that people stop commuting to work. What is happening now leaves us with a certain déjà vu of 2020with the difference that the reason is no longer a virus, but an energy crisis and the objective is save energy. Asia has already released the 2020 manual. Given its greatest dependence on Iranian crude oilthe first movements have arrived from Southeast Asia. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim advertisement that officials linked to the Administration will implement teleworking to reduce fuel consumption. The Philippines chose cut the work week to four days for executive officials, with the same objective. The measure has a preceding in 1990, when the country experienced a situation similar to the current one during the Gulf War. Sri Lanka and Pakistan also implemented the four-day week in their State departments, and countries such as Vietnam and Thailand They explicitly asked teleworking to reduce unnecessary travel. The International Energy Agency recommends teleworking. The International Energy Agency published a decalogue of measures to reduce the impact of the power surge. Teleworking tops that list due to its direct effect on fuel consumption during daily trips. The recommendation of the energy agency for reduce the volume of trips is not trivial, the report notes that “three additional days of teleworking, for those who allow it, could reduce automobile oil consumption by 2% to 6%, with average potential reductions of around 20% for individual drivers.” Spain advances its mobility plans one year. On March 20, the Government approved the Royal Decree-Law that launches the ‘Comprehensive Response Plan to the Crisis in the Middle East’ with a mobilization of 5 billion euros. One of the measures that this plan also includes is to advance the entry into force of the work mobility plans provided for in the Sustainable Mobility Law that was already approved, going from 24 to 12 months. This Mobility Law included the obligation for companies with work centers with 200 or more workers (or shifts of more than 100 workers) to create sustainable mobility plans that must include concrete measures to reduce travel through active mobility, collective transport and, this is the key, offer teleworking options in positions that allow it. Teleworking is already in the law, although no one has imposed it. In 2020, teleworking was an emergency measure and without a prior regulatory basis to regulate it. Now, there is a Remote Work Law and is being integrated into sustainable mobility plans, with deadlines and sanctions. Companies are not obliged to offer teleworking in a generalized way to its employees, but to design a strategy to reduce travel, which in many cases involves remote work. Not having teleworking does not carry a direct sanction. Not having a mobility planyes it does, which makes teleworking an increasingly less discretionary option for certain companies. If the energy crisis continues, the jump from recommendation to obligation now has much less distance than it did five years ago, because the legal basis is already in force. In Xataka | Teleworking will experience a second youth, at a very specific moment: when the boomers retire Image | Freepik, Unsplash (Jan Baborak)

SpaceX is about to go public promising to bring AI to space. What really sells is satellite Internet

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SpaceX has confidentially registered with the SECthe US regulator, its application to go public, in what could become the largest public offering in history. Why is it important. The valuation of Musk’s company exceeds one and a half billion dollars, and the objective is to raise between 50,000 and 75,000 million euros before the end of June. To put it in perspective: the IPO of the Arab oil company Saudi Aramco in 2019until now the largest in history, raised just over 25,000 million. Furthermore, this news has been presented as a milestone in space exploration, but if you read between the lines, the real story is different. Between the lines. The story that SpaceX is going to sell to Wall Street mixes rockets, Mars and AI. It is the perfect cocktail to attract capital in 2026, but analysts who have looked at the numbers and quote Reuters are a little cruder: the $1.5 trillion valuation is only supported by starlinkthe satellite Internet service that already has nine million subscribers and generated $8 billion in revenue in 2024 alone. SpaceX billed between 15,000 and 16,000 million dollars in 2025, with about 8,000 million in profit. Starlink accounts for the clear majority of that revenue and almost all of the margins. The orbital data centersthe great promise of the IPO, are still an unproven concept. As said market strategist Shay Boloor: “Starlink is the only reason this assessment is defensible.” The contrast. SpaceX was born in 2002 with a mission: to make humanity multiplanetary. Mars as a destination and reusable rockets as a means. That narrative has had to give some ground. And Wall Street, which has been buying anything with the word AI for years, hears that and opens its wallet. The money trail. This year, SpaceX absorbed xAI, Musk’s AI startup and now also the parent company of X. Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in 2022 and since then, X and xAI are projects that consume a lot of cash, especially the latter. SpaceX’s IPO, according to The New York Timesis proposed among other things to pay the debt that Twitter incurred when Musk bought it and to finance xAI’s data centers. In other words: the jewel in the crown finances loss-making companies. The big question. Can SpaceX trade at $1.5 trillion with markets shaken by war? The Nasdaq just suffered its worst week in almost a yearwith the war between the United States and Iran in the background and oil skyrocketing. Some bankers have pushed SpaceX to keep between 15,000 and 20,000 million in cash before exiting. For what may happen. The moment of debut can be decisive for the worse even if the fundamentals are great. What is certain is that if the operation goes ahead, Musk, who owns about 42-44% of SpaceX, will almost certainly cross the threshold of a trillion dollars of personal wealth. He would be the first billionaire in history. In Xataka | Seven of the ten largest fortunes in the world in 2026 are due to AI: this illustrative graph makes it very clear Featured image | SpaceX

With the arrival of good weather in Ukraine, Russia thought it was a good idea to bring out its hidden tanks. It wasn’t at all

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In 2022, many analysts assumed that tanks would remain the undisputed symbol of land power, but four years later the battlefield has evolved to the point where multi-ton vehicles can be neutralized for systems that fit in a backpack and cost thousands of times less. A return at the worst time. Winter is giving way to spring in Ukraine, and Russia has decided it was time to bring out its armored vehicles again after almost one year of limited useconvinced that she could regain initiative on the front. However, this movement has collided head-on with the current reality of the battlefield: an environment saturated with drones, remote mines and sensors where any concentration of vehicles becomes an almost immediate target. What on paper should have been an offensive reactivation has translated, in its first stages, in massive losses of material, with mechanized attacks that have ended in authentic “massacres” in a matter of minutes. From hiding to exposing yourself. For much of the last year, Russia had chosen to reduce the use of vehicles and advance with small groups of infantry to minimize their exposure. That tactic, although costly in lives, was more difficult to neutralize in a battlefield dominated by drones. But the enormous human wear and tear (with hundreds of thousands of casualties) has forced Moscow to rethink its approach. The return to mechanized attacks is not so much a choice as a necessity: replacing men with machines, even if that means assuming a new type of vulnerability. The Soviet heritage. It we have counted on other occasions. To sustain this change, Russia has begun to turn to its deeper reservesreactivating T-72 tanks from the 1970s and 1980s that remained in storage for years. This movement reveals an important turn in the contest, because it is no longer about deploying the best available, but rather to maintain volume at any price. The Russian military industry is still capable of regenerating units, but increasingly with older materialmore heterogeneous and less adapted to an environment where threats come from above and not from the front. A battlefield that does not forgive armor. The problem from the Moscow sidewalk is that the context has radically changed. Drones, capable of detecting, tracking and attacking vehicles with great precision, have turned mechanized advances into operations andxtremely risky. Added to this are remotely deployed mines and coordinated attacks that turn any movement in a trap. What was once the spearhead of offensives now behaves like a slow, visible and predictable target, especially when deployed in a group. Hit logistics to wear out. In addition, a parallel strategy is added to this direct pressure on the vehicles: the continuous attack to the rear. The Ukrainian coups against fuel tankslogistics nodes and supply centers seek to make any accumulation of armored vehicles on the front meaningless. And without fuel and maintenance, even a large number of vehicles lose operational value. Thus, the Russian problem is not only how many tanks you can deploy, but how long you can keep them functioning in real combat conditions. Accelerate burnout. In short, Russia appears to be trading a depleting resource (the labor) for another that is also beginning to become scarce: his armored legacy of the Cold War. In the short term it may be able to sustain the pressure on the front, but if current losses continue, the material cost can quickly grow to become unsustainable. In that scenario, the return of the tanks It does not seem to represent a return to conventional warfare, but rather a risky bet on a battlefield that has already evolved. faster than them. Image | Telegram In Xataka | Iran is winning the war with “Ukrainian mathematics”: there is no need to shoot down US fighters, it is enough to force them to take off In Xataka | Europe’s fear of an unprecedented situation in the Mediterranean: a Ukrainian drone has left a ticking bomb floating

helping to bring down the US

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Currently, a military satellite It can detect movements of vehicles or facilities with a resolution of just a few centimeters, and that information can reach an operator thousands of kilometers away in a matter of minutes. In current conflicts, that information advantage has become one of the most decisive factorseven above brute force. An absence that is not such. At first glance and during the first stages of the war in the eastRussia seemed to be outside the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran, limiting itself to diplomatic condemnations and avoiding direct involvement that could escalate the war. However, this apparent passivity has proven misleading, because Moscow has never been a formal military ally of Tehran and its strategy is not to intervene openly, but rather to maximize benefits (geopolitical, economic and strategic) while avoiding direct risks, in a balance where the visible distance hides a much more active involvement. in the shadow. The invisible support. I told a few hours ago exclusively the wall street journal that, far from sending troops or deploying forces, Russia is providing one of the most decisive assets in modern warfare: information and technologyincluding in the equation satellite imagestarget positioning data and drone improvements that allow Iran to fine-tune its attacks against US and allied systems in the region. This type of support, similar to what the West has provided to Ukraine, has improved the precision and effectiveness of Iranian attacks, especially against radars and command centersdemonstrating that the advantage on the battlefield no longer depends only on direct fire, but on who sees better and earlier. And round trip. The truth is that the relationship between both countries has evolved towards a two-way exchange where Iran initially provided the Shahed drones that have transformed the war in Ukraine, while Russia has returned the favor by perfecting those technologies and returning them improved. The result is something of a tactical convergence in which Iranian attack patterns begin to look more and more like those used through Moscow in Europeconsolidating along the way a kind of “closed circuit” of military innovation outside the Western ecosystem. Keep the war alive. They remembered in the Journal that, for the Kremlin, the conflict offers advantages clear enough: diverts US attention and resources away from Ukraine, raises the energy prices that sustain its economy, and weakens the West’s ability to sustain multiple fronts simultaneously. Not only that. At the same time, prolonging the war without bringing about the fall of the Iranian regime allows Russia maintain a key partner within his vision of a multipolar order, one where Tehran acts as an important player against Western influence. Balance calculated against Washington. This support, however, is deliberately kept in a contained levelenough to help Iran, but without crossing lines that provoke a direct confrontation with the United States. In other words, Moscow calibrates its involvement to erode and wear down the American position, but it does so without exposing itself excessively, in a strategy that combines plausible deniability, indirect pressure and selective transfer of capabilities. The war that is not on the maps. If you also want, the complete photo reflects a scenario where the russian position reveals a new form of participation in war conflicts: one where not being physically at the front does not imply being outside of the war, far from it. Thus, through data, technology and experience Tactically, Moscow aims to help shape the battlefield from a distance, demonstrating that in today’s conflicts decisive influence can be exerted without the need to deploy soldiers, but through what allows others to fight more effectively. Image | vantor, IDF Spokesperson’s Unit In Xataka | The war with Iran is leading the US to a plan B that no one imagined: avoiding the nuclear objective at all costs In Xataka | The US nuclear supercarrier has a problem: its marines are sleeping on the ground in the middle of the war with Iran

Your bet in the AI ​​race is to bring together several functions in a single model

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The artificial intelligence race is often told as a competition to see who builds the most powerful model or the one that dominates the most benchmarks. In the middle of that board, the French startup Mistral AI has just presented Mistral Small 4a proposal that tries to occupy a different place in that conversation. It is not presented as a model limited to a single function, but as one that, according to the company, seeks to bring together several advanced capabilities within the same tool. What exactly is Small 4. The company presents it as the new great iteration of its Mistral Small family and, above all, as the first model of the house that brings together capabilities that were previously distributed among several lines. Specifically, it integrates functions associated with Magistral, Pixtral and Devstral along with those of the Small series itself. Fewer models, more features. One of the central ideas of the announcement is to concentrate tasks that are normally solved with different tools in a single system. According to Mistral, the goal is that the same model can be used to converse, analyze complex information, work with images or assist in programming without having to switch between several specialized systems. The numbers behind Small 4. The model is based on a Mixture of Experts architecture, a design that distributes processing between different specialized submodels and that today appears in several artificial intelligence systems. In the case of Small 4, Mistral indicates that the system has 128 experts and that only four participate in each generated token. According to the company, the model reaches 119B total parameters, with 6B assets per token, and offers a context window of up to 256k. Who is this model intended for?. Beyond its architecture, Mistral also describes quite clearly the scenarios in which it imagines the use of Small 4. Let’s see. Developers: Automate programming tasks, explore code bases, and code agent workflows Businesses: conversational assistants, document understanding and multimodal analysis Research: mathematics, complex analysis and reasoning tasks The underlying idea is that the model can move between quite different needs without forcing you to change the system depending on the type of work. The graphics. In the material accompanying the announcement, Mistral includes several graphs where it compares Small 4 with other models in different benchmarks. These comparisons are not limited to the score obtained in each test. They also show the average length of the responses each system generates, a data the company uses to illustrate how much text each model needs to produce to achieve certain results. One of the graphs in the advertisement corresponds to the AA LCR benchmark, where Mistral compares the scores of various models and the average length of the responses they generate to solve the same tasks. The data published by the company are the following: • Mistral Small 4: 0.72 score with 1,600 characters• GPT-OSS 120B: 0.51 with 2,500 characters• Claude Haiku: 0.80 with 2,700 characters• Qwen3-next 80B: 0.75 with 5,800 characters• Qwen3.5 122B: 0.84 with 5,700 characters The comparison. Small 4 is not the highest scoring model. Both Claude Haiku and the Qwen models appear higher in that indicator. However, Mistral highlights another aspect of the comparison: the length of the responses. According to the company, its model achieves this combination of score and output length by generating significantly less text than several of its competitors, something it relates to lower latency and lower inference cost. The short answer trick. A shorter answer is not better simply because it takes up less space. It is only if it manages to solve the task with a level of quality comparable to that of a longer answer. This is where Mistral tries to put the focus: if a model achieves a competitive result by generating less text, it can respond faster, consume fewer resources and reduce the cost of inference. In other words, the advantage is not in being more concise, but in needing less output to reach a useful result. How to access the new model. Small 4 can not only be used via API and AI Studio. Being published under license Apache 2.0is also proposed as an open model that can be downloaded, adjusted and deployed in your own environments. The company adds that it can be tried for free at build.nvidia.com, in addition to offering it for production as NVIDIA NIM. Images | Mistral In Xataka | OpenAI has been wanting to be the bride at the wedding and the dead man at the funeral for years: now it has finally defined its priority

It took eight months for the French Academy to bring Jim Carrey to Paris. It took the Internet eight hours to decide that it wasn’t him

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On February 26, Jim Carrey received a prestigious Honorary César for his entire career in Paris, after years of semi-retirement. But what was born as a touching emotional tribute at the center of a conspiracy theory: was it really him who took the stage, or an impersonator with prosthetics? The story of how an Instagram post unleashed chaos (and how it ended up being denied). A tribute. Jim Carrey has received this year’s Honorary César: the French Oscars rewarded his “exceptional versatility” with an award that Julia Roberts, Christopher Nolan and David Fincher had already received. It also arrived at a time when Carrey’s career was at a peculiar point: in 2022, at the press conference for ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’ he announced that he retired. But he came back three years later. with brutal honesty: “I have bought many things and I need the money“Frankly.” Therefore, Carrey arrived in Paris after a false retirement that had made him partially disappear, yes, from the red carpets and premieres. And now he was on the most elegant stage in European cinema. He had not disappeared from the public light, however: in November, had been seen at Soundgarden’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Los Angeles. But his appearances have always been, in recent years, spaced out in time and without warning. The delivery. The first unexpected moment of the night came when Carrey, after being introduced by Michel Gondry, and with an aesthetic that left behind the lush beard of recent years, gave the acceptance speech completely in French. The accent was unmistakably American, but it was very worked. As Gregory Caulier, general delegate of the Caesars, would later reveal, I had prepared it for months. In it revealed a connection with France that no one knew: his ancestor Marc-François Carré (the family’s original surname before Anglicization) was born in Saint-Malo and, from there, emigrated to Canada The change. In fact, already at the aforementioned Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony its appearance It had aroused some surprise: it already had the aesthetic that it repeated at the Césars, with shoulder-length hair and slightly different facial features than usual. The first speculations pointed to the cosmetic surgery as a possible reason and some experts on the subject speculated about what those interventions could have been. Dr. Millicent Rovelo speak of an upper blepharoplasty (to remove excess skin from the upper eyelids) and a significant volume of Botox on the forehead. Another surgeon, Dr. John Diaz pointed out to a possible cervical tightening procedure. The very media Dr. Tony Youn pointed out signs of an endoscopic brow lift that would explain the slight displacement of the hairline. and joined the hypothesis of blepharoplasty and Botox. Finally, Dr. Raffi Hovsepian, dissented: The changes in the forehead and eye area seemed compatible with natural male aging, without surgical evidence. Let’s not forget that in 2003, Carrey appeared at the Teen Choice Awards completely blindfolded, wearing sunglasses, pretending to come out of surgery. By then rumors arose about the tweaks to his physique. The mask artist. Four days after the ceremony, Alexis Stone posted a carousel of three images on Instagram. The first two featured Jim Carrey. The third was a latex mask, false teeth, a dark wig, and various makeup materials arranged on a table with the Eiffel Tower out of focus in the background. The caption was simply “Alexis Stone as Jim Carrey in Paris.” Stone is a self-taught effects designer who has built a career on hyperrealistic transformations that have allowed her to pass herself off as Madonna, Jack NicholsonLana Del Rey, Robin Williams’ Ms. Doubtfire or Glenn Close’s Cruella de Vil. Stone usually documents his process in detail, but this was not the case: we only saw a mask that even had details that some users saw themselves as belonging to an AI generationwith excessively perfect contours and a blurry background typical of synthetic images. but when famous like Megan Fox or Katy Perry spread Stone’s posts, the rumor germinated all over the internet: the Césars were not Jim Carrey, but an imposter. Because. The arguments that the conspiracy theorists maintained They appeared almost at the same time as the gala. For example, the color of the eyes, usually dark brown, here a more greenish tone. More: Carrey is left-handed, and several short videos showed him in Paris using his right hand to sign autographs. The third argument was the speech itself: that someone who was theoretically retired and had no active ties to France spoke for ten minutes in French with very elaborate pronunciation, it was, for a part of the public, tremendously suspicious. The interviews that prove it. Of course, this is the moment that conspiracy theorists have been waiting for to bring up interviews from Carrey’s past with ambiguous, philosophical or downright incomprehensible answers. In 2017 declared that he did not believe in personalities, that the fashion party he had gone to and at which he was being interviewed seemed to him “absolutely meaningless” (from a metaphysical point of view) and that “there is no self, there are only things happening” (later the actor himself I would rate the interview “existential experiment”). In a previous interview, he calmly said “I’m dead“, but it was in the context of a conversation about spirituality and ego. We recommend fans of the most disconcerting Carrey to check out the incredible documentary ‘Jim and Andy’, which documents his literal transformation into Andy Kaufman for the filming of ‘Man on the Moon’. Official confirmation. The first official statements came from Marleah Leslie, Jim Carrey’s publicist for decades, with a brief message and that left no room for doubt: “Jim Carrey attended the César Awards, where he accepted his Honorary César Award.” That same day, the aforementioned Gregory Caulier told Variety what the eight months of preparatory conversations had been like and the months that the actor dedicated to working on his French. Carrey went to Paris accompanied by … Read more

Tesla aspired to bring the automobile industry to its knees. Now the auto industry is giving it back

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Tesla has been held accountable to investors. His 2025 numbers have been bad. Pretty bad, in fact. So much so that it has confirmed the almost immediate cessation of the Tesla Model S and Model X, the cars that helped popularize the brand but whose sales are already minimal. It will make robots instead. It is confirmation of a much deeper problem. Bye. Elon Musk confirmed it a few days ago. Tesla will stop manufacturing its most expensive vehicles. The Freemont factory, where the company produces the Tesla Model S and Model will start producing humanoid robots Optimus. Without just a very sentimental message, as usually happens in the motor industrythe CEO of Tesla has practically treated these models as mere employees. The farewell is similar to that given to the classic worker who ends up at the exit door with a cardboard box in his hands to carry a photo of his children, three pens and the stapler that the company refused to buy. I can almost see the sleeve of the sweater sticking out and the shirt half removed from the pants. Deeper. Stopping production of its most expensive electric cars, no matter how few they sold, points to Tesla having a deeper problem: it wanted to reconvert the automobile industry. And, over the years, the automobile industry seems to be beating the company. To understand what we are talking about, we must take into account different variables: how Tesla carved out a niche for itself in the market, how it revolutionized automobile production and how that same revolution has put a back on the backpack that is becoming more complicated to handle every day. And, of course, how it is facing the same problems as every other automaker. His emergence. Building a car brand from scratch is complicated. Almost impossible, as many Chinese companies are experiencing firsthand. Tesla was born in 2003 and It wasn’t until 2020 when it was profitable each and every quarter of the same year. It was thanks to the sale of emissions credits and bitcoins. It wouldn’t be until later when it became profitable on its own selling electric cars. In those 17 years, the company was sustained with the help of investors, partnerships with companies like Toyota and aid from the United States Government. And if they managed to keep losing money for almost two decades, it was because they promised a differential technology, something that only they could deliver at that time. A groundbreaking vehicle for what was on the market. Aspirational. Tesla became an aspirational company. He Tesla Roadster (the only one that has existed so far) walked all over Hollywood and later the Tesla Model S and Model X they became neck-turning vehicles of worship. I still remember the first time I saw a Tesla store in Amsterdam and how that huge vertical screen in the sedan It attracted the attention of all of us who were there sightseeing. Both cars were confirmation that a company could put an electric car on the street with an autonomy that allowed travel, with a striking aesthetic at that time and unbridled power compared to combustion cars. It was a desirable brand, a status symbol. Millions of copies. The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y They were the next step. The key to making Tesla a profitable company on its own was to sell millions of copies. To put an “affordable” electric car on the road or, at least, much cheaper than the competition with equal benefits, Tesla showed off its Gigapress. This machine allows you to create huge body parts, much larger than competing machines. This allows Tesla to produce faster and at a lower cost. But it has a problem: it needs millions and millions of copies to make it profitable and take advantage of it. Each profound change in the part to be produced forces very long development times and excessively extended technical stops. Furthermore, it is not easy to create that first original piece. Disadvantages that have forced the design of Tesla cars to remain practically unchanged. Too seen. Being a slave to design is a problem in the automobile industry. Tesla thought it could sell the same car for years or decades, but time is telling it that customers like to see new things. When someone spends tens of thousands of euros on a car, they like it to look fresh and new. The purchase of a car is still marked by irrational and passionate concepts above all logic. A car, no matter how much it is sold like that, is not a mobile phone. It’s not a black turtleneck either. These are products that, with a perfected and standardized design, differ little from each other without being fashionable. But above all, they are products with a rapid renewal rate. The car, if all goes well, will be in our house for more than a decade, which is why we like to buy the latest things within our budget. Millions of copies of the Tesla Model 3, Model Y, Model S and Model with hardly any renovations they have diluted its novel image. Their cars have an aesthetic designed not to go out of style quickly but the customer needs to put new things in their mouths every so often. That is why generations in the automobile industry last between six and eight years, with a more or less profound renewal in the middle of the commercial life to boost sales again. And the competition tightens. Tesla thought he could turn the automobile into another consumer good. Elon Musk even promised sales of 20 million units per year. An outrage if we take into account that it is doubling the production of Toyota, the largest manufacturer in the world. This would be possible (and with many doubts) if its competitive advantage was so overwhelming that it left its cars in a position years ahead of the competition. But if we have seen anything since 2020, … Read more

bring 30,000 drivers from Türkiye

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The road transport sector in Spain faces a serious generational change problem which puts the movement of goods at risk. Logistics companies are looking for creative ways to keep everything moving. A recent initiative promises change this trend and import talent from another country with many more professionals available: Türkiye. Spain runs out of drivers. Spain has more than 30,000 jobs for truck drivers that it cannot meet, a demand that represents almost 10% of the sector’s total workforce, made up of some 390,000 professionals. These vacancies complicate the daily operations of companies, which struggle to find enough hands to maintain their supply routes. Far from being a “temporary blip”, the sector is experiencing a progressive aging of its staff, and the majority of current drivers are between 45 and 55 years old. A third of them will retire in the next 10 years and there is no generational replacement to take their place. Only 5% of Spanish truck drivers are under 25 years old, which shows the lack of generational change in this demanding profession. The agreement with Türkiye. In this context, the Andalusian transport association Usintra and the Córdoba Campus Foundation they have reached an agreement collaboration with the Ministry of Labor and Social Security of Türkiye with the aim of recruiting drivers in that country who are willing to come to work in Spain. ​In Türkiye there are more than 300,000 truck drivers looking for work, a figure that contrasts with the shortage of drivers that Spain suffers and opens the door to a practical solution. The objective is for the General Directorate of the Turkish Employment Agency to select these professionals in Turkey, and bring the candidates to Spain to fill the vacancies in Spanish logistics companies. Homologation of permits. Drivers recruited in Türkiye will receive additional training at the Córdoba FP Campus in order to approve the necessary permits to transport goods in Spain and they will learn Spanish. During all this training time, the entities involved will offer them accommodation and food. Afterwards, their documents will be legalized so that they can start working in logistics companies in Spain. Search for talent in Spain. In addition to looking outside, the government has launched the Reconduce Planin which 500,000 euros will be allocated for subsidies of up to 3,000 euros per person to finance and encourage courses and exams to obtain the necessary permits to be a truck driver and transport goods. A measure that from the sector is considered insufficient to alleviate the personnel deficit and the serious problem of generational change that the sector is suffering, greatly affected by the low salary and long hours away from home. The Community of Madrid offers free training for the Certificate of Professional Aptitude (CAP) with 6.48 million euros between 2026 and 2027, aimed at those over 21 years of age with a B card, to train about 1,200 applicants. In Xataka | That Japan has 100,000 people over 100 years old explains a problem: they are literally running out of drivers. Image | Unsplash (Gabriel Santos)

“During the process with Amazon we did not bring innovation to the market for 18 months”

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There’s something liberating about talking to someone who doesn’t have to defend decisions they didn’t make. Gary Cohen He came to iRobot in 2024 to be its CEO when the founder, Colin Angle, He jumped ship after the collapse of the deal with Amazon. Now, more than a year later, from an office in Bedford where he has just renewed his lease – a gesture of permanence in the midst of chaos – he has spoken to Xataka with the frankness of who has had to choose between dignified death and pragmatic survival. “My goal is to make Colin proud,” he says of the departed founder. “He calls it ‘his baby.’ I want to make him feel like we were able to turn this company around.” It’s a curious statement coming from who just sold that baby to Picea Roboticsthe Chinese manufacturer that will now own the company that invented the home robot vacuum cleaner. Dead in the closet At one point in the conversation, Cohen drops an image that sticks: “I have hundreds of dead lawnmower robots in this building.” It refers to Terra project, iRobot’s failed attempt to expand beyond vacuum cleaners. These technological corpses are the perfect metaphor for a company that was ahead of the market… but did not know how to convert that advantage into products that arrived on time. Original sin was go all in on elegant but impractical technology. Colin Angle, a brilliant roboticist at MIT, insisted on camera-based navigation as Chinese competitors adopted LiDAR. Exactly the same as Tesla’s approach to Chinese cars, by the way. “Consumers want to map their homes in twenty minutes, not two hours,” Cohen explains with the wisdom of someone who comes from selling razors at Gillette, not robots. Two hundred software engineers worked at Machine Learning to make that vision work. Meanwhile, companies like Ecovacs or Roborock were overtaking them from the right with cheaper products and, to iRobot’s pain, technologically superior according to many customers. “During the period with Amazon, the management team took its foot off the gas and we didn’t bring innovation to market for about 18 months.” This confession about the 18 months of paralysis while they waited the approval of the sale to Amazon for 1.7 billion It’s devastating. The company was frozen, unable to react as the market moved at Chinese speed. It was not until the last year, already working with Picea, when iRobot incorporated LiDAR into its range. When European regulators ended up blocking the operation to “protect competition,” anddestiny was sealed. The irony hurts: those European regulators prevented an American company from buying another American company, and the result is that it has ended up being absorbed by a Chinese company that played its cards well. When I point out this paradox, Cohen responds cautiously and diplomatically: “This was not a hostile takeover. We went to them.” The creditor’s embrace The relationship with Picea began like many dependency relationships: out of necessity. iRobot I owed them 161 million in manufacturing costs when Cohen took over. They needed to completely reinvent themselves, and they needed to do it quickly. In less than a year they launched eight new models“finally giving the people what they wanted, including LiDAR navigation and scrubbing combo products.” But the final blow came from the tariffs. 46% on imports from Vietnamwhere they manufacture for the US market. $23 million extra in costs in 2025 alone. “Some potential buyers looked at our business and said ‘we don’t want to take risks until the tariff situation is resolved.’” The candidates evaporated one by one. When the last potential buyer couldn’t close the deal, Cohen made the pragmatic decision. “We told Picea: you have a great partnership with us, why don’t you buy from us?” And in one month they closed the deal that turns the supplier, creditor and competitor, all in onein owner. The promise of continuity “Is business as usual. iRobot is here to stay. “We don’t expect any disruption.” Cohen insists Roombas will continue to work, apps will maintain their service and support will continue. For the millions of users (in Spain, where “Roomba” has become as synonymous with a robot vacuum cleaner as “Kleenex” is with a handkerchief) this is the only thing that matters. The offices will remain: Bedford, Tokyo, Madrid, London. Or so the CEO claims. The MIT engineers who form the ‘iRobot Labs’ will continue working. “We have intellectual property that we contribute. They have patents. Together we will be able to differentiate products much more.” The official narrative is optimistic because think about the perfect marriage between American innovation and Chinese efficiency. But when I ask how much of the new product line was actually developed by iRobot, the answer says a lot without saying, “It’s been a partnership.” The most innovative features, such as the compactor container wave retractable scrub roller coverwere developed by Picea. The value of being late “You have to treat every day as if you were second or third, not as if you were first.” It is the advice that Cohen would give to technology entrepreneurs, born from his experience at Gillette when they had 60% of the market but acted as challengers. At some point, iRobot forgot that lesson between its IPO in 2005 and its forced sale for a fraction of its peak value. “My goal,” Cohen says near the end, “is to make customers like your mother happy.” You are referring to my comment about how difficult it was for my mother to set up her Roomba. It’s a modest promise for a company that dreamed of revolutionizing domestic robotics, but maybe realism is exactly what they need now. There is something moving about Cohen defending a company he didn’t build, trying to save half a thousand jobs, promising to honor the legacy of a founder who is no longer here. “Colin was a visionary,” he says, then honestly adds that they couldn’t execute that vision. The future has a … Read more

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