Embodied MaaS emerges: three startups in three months race to rent out robot brains by API

新智元 · wechat · 2026-11-05

The token-selling business model of LLMs is being replicated for robots. Google now processes 3,200 trillion tokens monthly (7x in a year), and IDC says China's MaaS market hit ¥10.6B in H1 2026, up nearly 9x YoY. Now embodied AI is at the same inflection point.

Robot bodies can't host their own brains: a ¥100K robot spends ¥30K on an Nvidia Thor chip that's nearly maxed out after vision and motion control, with severe thermal limits; mainstream 10B-class embodied models can't fit on-device
Post-training is the real battle: the article details a three-stage pipeline — SFT (80–90% success), DAgger for error recovery (90%+), and RECAP reinforcement training — pushing atomic-task success toward 100%, mirroring pretraining/SFT/RLHF for LLMs
Three launches in three months: Force Origin's open general embodied MaaS platform (first to support all three post-training methods), Physical Intelligence's invite-only PiAPI Beta, and DreamLabs' $90M-seeded DreamAPI at $3/hour for entertainment/education
Deployed results include 1,200+ packages/hour at >99% success on logistics lines; cross-embodiment generalization remains unsolved, so the business may skew toward platform-plus-custom rather than pure token fees
Global humanoid shipments reached 25K units in H1 2026 (+432% YoY), with China at nearly 80%

Original post →

Embodied MaaS emerges: three startups in three months race to rent out robot brains by API

More from Embodied