A New Front Opens Between Zuckerberg and Musk over Robots (www.wsj.com)

Wall Street Journal coverage highlights that the public rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s Tesla is spilling into robotics, with observers seeing a new competitive front as both companies accelerate work on humanoid robots. The story frames this not as a personal feud but as a strategic clash over who can combine cutting‑edge AI models, large sensory datasets and custom hardware to build commercially viable general‑purpose robots. That competition matters because the winner could set industry standards for data access, simulation pipelines, safety protocols and the business model for physical AI agents. Technically, the race centers on integrating large vision and language models with real‑time control systems — fusing high‑resolution video, multimodal perception and reinforcement learning/sim‑to‑real techniques to teach robots robust manipulation and navigation. It also raises questions about compute and data arms races (who controls the training corpora and simulators), hardware tradeoffs (actuators, sensors, onboard compute), and regulation/safety for embodied AI. For the AI/ML community, this implies more emphasis on scalable robot datasets, reproducible sim‑to‑real benchmarks, interdisciplinary tooling, and urgent conversations about governance as these systems move from lab demos to deployed machines.