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In a September 7 announcement, XPENG claimed that over 80 percent of the line's core processes are automated. It's adapting quality systems from its car business and applying them to make robots consistently as production increases. "Today's step is small, but XPENG is building the production lines for an entirely new product category," He said.

The walk is an attractive way for XPENG to mark that progress, but it doesn't tell us much about whether Iron can make it through a working day. XPENG did not reveal the line's current output or how much testing was done before the walk, and mass production is still a year-end goal. 

Iron's first jobs will be in XPENG stores and campuses

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Your first encounter with Iron could be during a showroom visit. XPENG has previously mentioned reception and guided tour responsibilities, along with sales assistance. It plans to deploy robots in its own stores and campuses first, with deliveries in China and overseas markets planned for 2027. The announcement did not specify US availability or a price.

XPENG's latest announcement states that Iron has 76 degrees of freedom across its body and 21 in each hand, describing the number of independent ways it can move. That articulation supports walking and moving objects around in a space designed for humans.

The three Turing AI chips provide up to 2,250 trillion operations per second. XPENG says this lets Iron run its AI model onboard and perform complex tasks without a remote operator. While processing information locally can help to cut down on delays, a large computing number doesn't tell us how well Iron would handle a shopper going off-script.

XPENG also states that the outer structure was designed to be flexible with safety in mind. That's important for a robot designed to interact with customers, but the announcement doesn't provide an independent safety evaluation. These are planned jobs, with everyday performance still to be established.

Tesla has company in the humanoid robot race

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The Tesla parallel is easy to spot. Both carmakers are eager to apply their AI and manufacturing skills to robots. Tesla announced that it would convert Model S and X production lines for Optimus, and its second-quarter filing included preparations for large-scale robot production. It's too early to declare a winner, though. 

Others have already built humanoids in meaningful quantities. In April, Figure reported that it had produced over 350 Figure 03 robots and demonstrated a production cycle of one robot per hour. Those robots were allocated to uses including internal development and data collection, so the total shouldn't be read as customer deliveries.

A more realistic comparison is what robots have achieved once they have left the factory. BMW says Figure's earlier Figure 02 robot inserted sheet-metal parts for welding at its Spartanburg plant. That was a specific, repetitive assignment, rather than building cars from scratch. Across ten months, it supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3s. %!s()

Next month, Cohen is launching Social Commerce Network (SCN), a digital-first business news network livestreamed across YouTube, X, TikTok and Instagram. SCN will broadcast three times per week (on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays) from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific. The show will feature a mix of news and interviews with CEOs and other business folks spanning consumer businesses, tech and fintech, retail, CPG, beauty and the creator economy.

Cohen will be joined as a co-host on SCN by Alaina Hartley, who is an ex-principal at VC firm Greycroft and a former Bain & Co. consultant who now heads her own consumer-brands consultancy, Santa Monica-based Dream Hunter.

SCN will officially launch on Oct. 6. The show will be shot in a new studio in Los Angeles’ Sawtelle neighborhood.

“Think CNBC for the generation that gets their news on their phone,” Cohen told Variety. “It’s a news show for the generation that is getting their news on social media.”

Cohen has built an audience of over 500,000 followers across digital platforms, including 250,000 on Instagram and 107,000 on YouTube. She produces short-form video and hosts the weekly podcast “Social Currency,” in which she conducts interviews with CEOs. Cohen said she’s going to continue producing the weekly podcast as well along with the thrice-weekly SCN shows. “It’s gonna be a lot!” she said.

For each of SCN’s broadcasts, the plan is for the first half of the show to cover the latest breaking news, with the second half comprising short-form interviews with CEOs and decisionmakers, “the people in the conversations we’re talking about,” Cohen said.

Another touchstone for Cohen is TBPN, the Technology Business Programming Network, which streams a daily talk show focused on Silicon Valley and Wall Street. TBPN was acquired this spring by OpenAI, whose execs see the show as promoting a “constructive” dialog with leaders about the future of AI.

“I think what TBPN has done was brilliant,” Cohen said. “They knew exactly what their target audience was and created a media platform to serve this audience.”

But Cohen expects the viewers of SCN to be more female skewing, according to Cohen: She said her followers are roughly 70% women.

“We are going to be talking about the companies driving massive shifts across the landscape of consumer businesses, and interviewing the leaders of those companies,” said Cohen, with an eye on women-led enterprises.

To fund the launch of SCN, Cohen has lined up several sponsors — across tech, fintech, hospitality, creator media and marketing — but she declined to name them. “We are looking to build this show alongside our sponsors who have come on board for the first year,” said Cohen. “They are truly partners in building the show with us.”

In the first two months, Cohen is going to be “hyper-focused on what our audience looks like,” and what kind of coverage they want to see going forward.

Why is she launching SCN now? “It is such an exciting time in the media landscape right now. My take on the industry is, as all forms of communication become automated, people are yearning for a human touch in media, and there’s nothing more human than live,” she said, adding that SCN producers will incorporate live feedback and questions from viewers for the show’s hosts. In addition, said Cohen, “we are seeing this incredible opportunity for creators like me to make their own media businesses.” %!s()

Speaking at the Big Brue festival in Somerset on Sunday, Osborne said: “You try and build a datacentre in Britain … I spent my life when I was politician trying to get people to agree to have new roads and railway lines and airport runways, and communities go up in arms – it’s really hard to build a datacentre.”

He said the UK would lose its “sovereignty” over tech to the US if it failed to allow datacentres to be built.

He explained: “You can either choose to have these datacentres in Ohio and Georgia and Michigan, which is where they’re all being built … we don’t allow these things to be built. They’re going to be built elsewhere, and you know that’s a loss of some sovereign control over the physical location where these things are.”

There have been protests about datacentres across the UK, including in central London, Devon and outside Holyrood in Edinburgh. People have said they are a blight on the landscape, questioned whether they will bring jobs to the local area, and argued they will take investment and space that could be used for affordable housing. There are also concerns about the vast water and energy use.

The government has classified AI datacentres as critical national infrastructure to get them built more quickly. But the Green party in England has called for a moratorium on building them.

Osborne dismissed the concerns over datacentres as nimbyism. He said: “I think a lot of the to opposition datacentres is very much like ‘not in my back yard’. There’s an enormous building boom going on in the United States of datacentres, even as the political opposition undoubtedly is growing.”

Verity Harding, the head of the AI and geopolitics project at Cambridge University’s Bennett School for Public Policy, said people had wider concerns over these centres.

She said: “The reason everyone hates datacentres has nothing to do with datacentres. It’s the only tangible thing to protest against … [people] just don’t like what’s happening and they don’t feel that anybody’s in control or thinking about the impact of it.

“It’s exactly because the tech industry execs are talking in this ridiculous way … You know, you cannot go out on the one hand and say this [AI] might kill everybody one week and then the next week go and appear at a big sales conference saying that you should integrate it into your business.”

Bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the largest AI companies, will be meeting world leaders at the UN general assembly in New York City this week amid debate over the prospect of dangerous, superintelligent AI and whether and how it should be regulated.

Osborne said: “The fact that corporate leaders are sitting down with the presidents and prime ministers of the world in the UN security council I would say actually shouldn’t be alarming. It’s actually reassuring that people are beginning to try and use the kind of institutions of the world to think about how we regulate this new technology.” %!s()

With a limited budget and big ideas, will Ahsoka season 2 succeed?

Photo: Suzanne Tenner/Lucasfilm

Ahsoka season 2 will answer major questions raised by its first season, which arrived on Disney Plus three years ago. One such question, which Lucasfilm co-CEO Dave Filoni hopes to answer for Star Wars fans on Jan. 20, 2027, is the arrival of the Mortis Gods and what it means for Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson) and her Mandalorian apprentice, Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), who are both stranded on the planet Peridea in another galaxy.

Fans who watched the finale of Ahsoka’s first season will recall that the statues of the gods, the Father, the Son, and the Daughter, were carved into rock on Peridea, a strong hint that they would play a role in season 2. However, for those who weren’t convinced, Filoni recently confirmed in an interview with Empire that the Mortis Gods will appear — and bring a lot of challenges to Ahsoka season 2.

Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.

“What we’re dealing with is: are you going to believe in this, or not? And what is the danger if it’s real? And how are you going to prioritize your goals here?” Filoni tells Empire, indicating that Ahsoka and her friends will be tested by the appearance of these Mortis Gods. “What would a Jedi do, versus what would a regular person do? Those things come up through the course of the season.”

Who are the Mortis Gods in Star Wars?

Image: Disney/Lucasfilm

The appearance of the Mortis Gods will challenge not only the narrative but also the production of Ahsoka’s second season. If you haven’t watched Filoni’s animated series, The Clone Wars, you may not know who the Mortis Gods are or why they are so significant. The Mortis Gods first appeared in 2011 during The Clone Wars season 3 in a three-part arc comprising episodes 15, 16, and 17, titled “Overlords,” “Altar of Mortis,” and "Ghosts of Mortis." It’s here that Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter), Ahsoka (Ashley Eckstein), and Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor) discover a mystical plane featuring three mythological manifestations of the Force: The Son, who aligned with the dark side of the Force; the Daughter, who aligned with the light side of the Force; and the Father, who represented the balance between the two. To sum up, it is heavily implied the three of them are the originators of the Force as we know it.

The Mortis Gods arc is a lot to wrap your head around, even in animated form, so it’s no surprise Filoni admits that bringing the lofty concept to live-action will be difficult.

“It’s a challenge, I can tell you,” Filoni says to Empire. “It was so surprising when George [Lucas] created these archetype god characters. What were we examining there in Clone Wars? What was the metaphor? A lot of it is about power, and what you do with power, and how you wield power. For a Jedi, I think it's a natural story path to get into these questions.”

It’s undeniable that Filoni has struggled to adapt the animated series The Clone Wars and Rebels to live-action, with the biggest offender being Hera Syndulla, as well as the decision to title the series Ahsoka despite its heavy focus on the Rebels cast. Season 2 of Ahsoka has also faced difficulties from the get-go, including production delays.

But the biggest worry Star Wars fans have about the series is that season 2 has an even smaller budget than season 1. With imposing ideas like the Mortis Gods being introduced, the concern is that Ahsoka season 2 simply won’t have the tools necessary to tackle such big story elements. Whether that’s true or not will be answered in January, but we can only hope Lucasfilm’s co-CEO is up to the challenge. %!s()

Brent crude futures, the international benchmark, were down 1.8% at $98.56 a barrel by 7:15 a.m. ET. U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures traded 2.3% lower to $93.60 per barrel.

Riyadh is running tests on the pipeline and could restart it this week, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News. Sources told Reuters that the pipeline was already pumping at a low rate and could resume exports at the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea later Tuesday.

The Saudis closed the pipeline after it sustained damage in a drone attack launched from Iraq on Sept. 10. The pipeline has played a crucial role in diverting Saudi crude oil exports to the Red Sea as the U.S. and Iran battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Washington, meanwhile, continues to ramp up economic pressure on Iran. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that all Iranian airlines will be shut down from Wednesday.

"How do we do that? That if they land, you cannot provide them with fuel. You cannot provide them with landing services, you cannot sell them tickets, or you will be knocked out of the dollar system," Bessent said on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

Investors are still eyeing a possible diplomatic solution to the Mideast conflict, following news that Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian is set to fly to the United Nations in New York.

Pezeshkian will address the assembly and present Iran's positions on "international developments," with a particular focus on its war with the U.S. and Israel, according to the country's semi-official Tasnim news agency. Talks with the leaders of several countries are also scheduled to take place Sept. 22 to 26, and 28, on the sidelines of the event.

WTI

Attention will likely remain focused on diplomatic developments, said Lukman Otunuga, head of market research at online brokerage FXTM.

"Confirmation of direct talks between Washington and Tehran could place additional selling pressure on prices by improving expectations for regional supply," Otunuga said.

"Conversely, Tehran has warned that renewed escalation would trigger a significant response, which could push crude prices higher," he added.

—CNBC's Anniek Bao contributed to the report. %!s()