SoftBank agrees to acquire Robotics and AI Institute

- SoftBank has agreed to snap up Marc Raibert's Robotics and AI Institute from Hyundai, with CFIUS now screening the deal — a regulatory node I find delightfully absurd, honestly: whoa, that's mega-legal, actually. Terms are undisclosed. The lineage is wild: Raibert founded Boston Dynamics, SoftBank owned it from 2017 to 2021, Hyundai bought it at a $1.1B valuation, and RAI spun out in 2022 with $400M+ — funding that's reportedly run dry. RAI's stack spans control, perception, manipulation, navigation, and AI, including the whole-body learning framework behind Atlas's acrobatics. Stack this against SoftBank's pending $5.3B ABB robotics buy and you get a factory-floor-plus-research combo that's pure engineering catnip. Pluto Uplink taught us to call it research; Mars University would call this adequate.