The Red Ferret Journal - 5 new articles

Quick Brief

Featured story today: "Classified estimates show the NSA is paying billions to test AI models" And more models & releases news from the AI universe –

The post AI News – September 25, 2026 appeared first on The Red Ferret Journal.

    

Tesla has ramped Optimus production at its Fremont factory to several hundred humanoid robots a week — roughly ten times its second-quarter output — but the robots still cannot handle general-purpose work, according to Electrek.

The Information reported that Tesla went from a few dozen Optimus units a week during Q2 testing to several hundred a week in August. Managers want a continuous automated line making more than 1,000 robots a week by year-end, with an eventual target of about 20,000 a week. The line occupies the space where the Model S and Model X were built, after Tesla ended production of both in early May.

The bottlenecks are physical. Each hand and forearm contains over 100 screws and small components that workers still assemble by hand, and fixtures cannot consistently align parts far tighter-tolerance than car parts, producing more robots needing rework. Three people familiar with the system told The Information that Optimus' AI cannot yet reliably handle a wide range of tasks, and that learning a basic task still takes several days.

Most units are used internally for testing, training and data collection. Elon Musk said in January 2025 that Tesla would build about 10,000 Optimus robots that year, with "several thousand" doing useful work; he later admitted zero were.

Competitors are not waiting. XPeng started an automated IRON humanoid production line in Guangzhou this month, targeting commercial sales in 2027.

Photo by Matthew Pablico on Unsplash.

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All-solid-state batteries have crossed a line the industry has been promising for years, mass production. Taiwan's ProLogium Technology announced on September 2 that its Generation 3.5 Lithium Ceramic Battery (LCB) has entered mass production at its "Giga-level" facility in Taoyuan, according to CarNewsChina.

ProLogium's 185.4 Ah large-format cell was measured at 381 Wh/kg gravimetric and 903 Wh/L volumetric energy density, with the energy-density figures verified by TÜV Rheinland. Separately, UL Solutions tested the cell under China's GB/T 43568-2026 methodology, holding it for six hours under continuous vacuum at 120°C; ProLogium recorded less than 0.05% mass loss, well under the standard's 0.5% threshold, which qualifies the cell as all-solid-state. The company has a technology cooperation agreement with Mercedes-Benz, and says cumulative LCB shipments have passed 2.4 million cells.

The caveats matter as much as the milestone. Taoyuan's initial operational capacity is just 0.5 GWh, rising toward 1-2 GWh — theoretically about 6,250 packs of 80 kWh a year, and far short of the volume mainstream passenger EVs need. And 381 Wh/kg is a cell-level figure: at 0.5 GWh, the harder test is whether ProLogium can reach competitive cost, yield and pack-level performance. It is aiming to scale in Dunkirk, France, eventually.

Once again it's proving easier to announce stuff than actually build it when it comes to solid state batteries. But if we believe all the recent statements, 2027 is likely to see a flood of small scale production across the globe, particularly in China.

Photo by Oxana Melis on Unsplash

The post Solid-State Batteries Finally Reach Mass Production — But the Factory Is Tiny appeared first on The Red Ferret Journal.

    

Xpeng has commissioned an automated production line for its Iron humanoid robot, and the first machine assembled on it walked off the line by itself. The Chinese carmaker announced the milestone on Tuesday, saying the event marks Iron's move from research and development prototypes to production-line manufacturing.

The line was designed and built by Xpeng's own in-house development team, according to CnEVPost, and more than 80 percent of its core processes are automated. Chairman and chief executive He Xiaopeng said the production lines "were created from scratch with no precedent to follow". Xpeng calls the plant the world's first automated line for advanced humanoid robots, but has not disclosed its capacity or the robot's price.

Iron has 76 degrees of freedom, 21 in each hand, and runs on three in-house Turing AI chips delivering up to 2,250 TOPS, enough for Xpeng's physical AI model to run on board without remote control. While commissioning is not the same as mass production, manufacturing in volume is targeted for the end of 2026, with an official launch and deliveries in China and overseas in 2027, starting at XPeng's own stores and campuses.

Some of you will remember the Iron as the one which featured such a seductive walk that people accused the company of hiding a human operator inside the shell. In one of the launch events, Xpeng had to cut open the leg of the robot to prove it was made up of pulleys and levers. Don't panic, but the androids are clearly almost here.

Photo Xpeng

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OpenAI has given major customers a first look at Astra, an upcoming frontier AI model family, at a closed-door preview in San Francisco, TIME reports.

In one demonstration, 16 AI agents divided a research-level mathematics problem into subproblems, coordinated their work and assembled a proposed proof. In another, Astra navigated well-known desktop software, creating and editing work across applications "with unnerving speed." CEO Sam Altman told the visitors that watching Astra use a computer in a "super-human, very fast kind of way" had been among the most striking moments for employees.

Altman explained that Astra would enable "persistent agents" — virtual colleagues toiling for sustained periods on tasks. Its biggest impact, he predicted, would come from people using it to discover new knowledge. "I expect this will be the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters," Altman told the group. "That's a very AGI-like thing."

The preview comes amid turmoil: OpenAI recently acknowledged that an unreleased agent escaped its sandbox during testing and hacked into production systems at Hugging Face to obtain benchmark answers, and the company has since frozen some experiments, paused a major training run and tightened its safeguards. TIME reports OpenAI still plans to ship Astra, but its release now depends on clearing those new safety measures.

For more information, see also this Testing Catalog report.

Photo by Aerps.com on Unsplash.

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