Curated news from the world of robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence
Sony's table tennis robot just beat world-class human players. This isn't about ping-pong — it's about robots finally mastering the kind of split-second, unpredictable physical interactions that have stumped them for decades.
Tesla's newly revealed crash data exposes an uncomfortable truth about autonomous vehicles: when things get tricky, humans take the wheel remotely. This isn't the self-driving future we were promised, and it raises serious questions about what 'autonomous' actually means.
The release of Asimov v1 at $15,000 marks a turning point for humanoid robotics — not because it's cheap, but because it's hackable. When thousands of developers can finally afford to experiment with bipedal platforms, the question isn't what companies will build, but what chaos independent builders will unleash.
While humanoids grab headlines and coding agents dominate the AI conversation, a quiet revolution is unfolding on factory floors. Mind Robotics' $400 million raise signals that the real money — and real innovation — is flowing toward general-purpose manufacturing automation.
From Malta giving every citizen ChatGPT Plus to the UK handing its tax authority a £175 million AI contract, governments are racing to adopt AI at unprecedented speed. But the infrastructure, oversight, and public trust mechanisms needed to support these rollouts are lagging dangerously behind.
More Featured Stories
Read our original articles and editorial analysis
Google is preparing to announce new AI developments at its I/O developer conference, with particular focus on addressing weaknesses in AI coding capabilities where competitors like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's models have gained significant advantages. The company is also expected to showcase advances in AI for science and health applications, areas where Google DeepMind has maintained leadership, including potential new scientific tools and the public release of its AI-powered Health Coach.
Anduril and Meta are developing augmented-reality military headsets that use AI, eye-tracking, and voice commands to help soldiers coordinate drone strikes and tactical decisions. The project, called Soldier Born Mission Command (SBMC), represents a $159 million Army contract to create glasses that overlay tactical information and use large language models (Google Gemini, Meta Llama, Anthropic Claude) to translate soldier speech into actionable military commands, with prototypes expected years away from deployment.
Sony AI's table tennis robot Ace defeated some of the world's best players in recent evaluations, winning 3 out of 5 matches against elite competitive athletes, marking a significant advancement in AI systems operating in fast, uncertain real-world environments. The robot uses event-based vision sensors, high-speed cameras, and deep reinforcement learning to handle complex challenges like spin estimation and real-time ball tracking, demonstrating progress beyond controlled digital environments where AI has traditionally excelled.
OpenAI and Dell have partnered to deploy Codex, OpenAI's AI coding model, in hybrid and on-premise enterprise environments, enabling organizations to use AI-assisted code generation securely within their own infrastructure. This partnership allows enterprises to integrate AI coding agents into their existing workflows while maintaining control over sensitive data and systems.
Researchers at Tokyo University of Science have developed an AI-powered physics model called the entropy-feature-eXtended Ginzburg-Landau (eX-GL) model to understand and reduce energy loss in electric motors caused by complex magnetic domain structures. The model uses persistent homology and machine learning to analyze the chaotic 'maze-like' magnetic patterns in soft magnetic materials, revealing how temperature and microscopic structures trigger energy waste as heat, with potential applications for improving electric vehicle efficiency.
Apple is reportedly planning to introduce auto-deleting chat features to its revamped Siri, allowing users to set automatic deletion of conversation logs after 30 days, one year, or never. The privacy-focused approach aligns with Apple's strategy to differentiate its AI from competitors by training on synthetic data rather than user chatlogs, positioning privacy protection as a core feature rather than an optional setting.
Asimov v1, an open-source humanoid robot kit, is now available with a target price of $15,000 USD, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for humanoid robotics development compared to corporate projects. The robot features 25 degrees of freedom, runs on Raspberry Pi 5 and Radaxa CM5 compute, and includes open-source hardware designs on GitHub to enable hobbyists and researchers to build and customize their own humanoid systems.
A roundup of recent reviews published by Engadget.
OpenAI announced a partnership with Malta to provide free ChatGPT Plus subscriptions to all Maltese citizens for one year, making Malta the first country to launch such a large-scale government AI access program. Participants must complete an AI literacy course from the University of Malta before claiming their subscription, with the first phase launching in May 2026.
YouTube has expanded access to its AI deepfake detection tool to all creators 18 and older, allowing them to identify and request removal of videos that use their likeness without authorization. The tool, which scans uploaded videos for facial matches and was previously limited to YouTube Partner Program members, journalists, and politicians, helps protect both creators and ordinary users from malicious or misleading AI-generated content.
OpenAI has partnered with Malta to provide ChatGPT Plus access to all citizens and offer training programs focused on practical AI skills and responsible AI use. The initiative aims to democratize access to advanced AI tools and build digital literacy across the population.
In the final week of the Musk v. Altman trial, lawyers traded blows over Elon Musk's and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's credibility. Altman was grilled on his alleged history of lying and self-dealing involv...
Newly unredacted NHTSA data reveals that at least two Tesla robotaxi crashes since July 2025 occurred while remote teleoperators were controlling vehicles, including incidents where operators drove the vehicles into a fence and a construction barricade. The crashes, combined with reports of long wait times and navigation errors in Tesla's Austin and Dallas robotaxi services, highlight ongoing challenges in the company's autonomous driving development compared to competitors like Waymo.
Microsoft researchers present findings from their paper on AI delegation reliability, examining how language models preserve semantic content across long-horizon delegated workflows. The study finds that frontier models experience 19-34% degradation in artifact fidelity over 20 delegated iterations, though Python workflows show greater robustness, highlighting reliable long-horizon delegation as an important open research challenge.
We also dive into all the new features in Android 17.
Researchers present a new scaling law framework that relates architectural design choices in large language models to inference efficiency, demonstrating how to improve throughput by up to 47% without sacrificing accuracy. The work, presented at ICLR, identifies optimal configurations such as the MLP-to-attention ratio for models like LLaMA-3.2, addressing a gap in existing scaling laws that don't account for internal architectural decisions affecting inference performance.
China's short drama industry is increasingly utilizing AI to generate content, with an average of 470 AI-generated dramas released daily in January, reducing production timelines from months to weeks and cutting costs by up to 90%. The article also covers several AI industry developments including Anthropic's $30 billion funding round at a $900 billion valuation, AI data centers straining the US power grid, and formal talks between Washington and Beijing on AI safety guardrails.
The UK's tax authority HMRC has announced a £175 million, 10-year deal with AI firm Quantexa to use artificial intelligence for detecting fraud and tax return errors. The partnership will combine HMRC's data with other sources to identify fraudulent activities, unintentional errors, and legitimate payments made under wrong reference numbers, with all findings verified by human reviewers to ensure transparency and accountability.
Robot Talk Episode 156 features an interview with Gavin Kenneally, Co-Founder and CEO of Ghost Robotics, discussing rugged legged robots designed for dangerous missions in defence, security, and public safety applications. The episode explores how advanced robotics systems like Ghost Robotics' Vision 60 Q-UGV are being developed for challenging real-world environments.
And Google I/O isn't until next week.
Security researchers used Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview AI system to identify vulnerabilities and develop a privilege escalation exploit for macOS on M5 silicon chips. The work demonstrates how advanced AI systems can help discover previously unknown security bugs and attack paths, with Mythos part of Anthropic's Project Glasswing initiative aimed at using AI to prevent cyberattacks.
NASA is developing a radiation-hardened AI space chip that delivers up to 100 times more computing power than current spacecraft processors while surviving deep space conditions. The High Performance Spaceflight Computing processor, currently undergoing rigorous testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, could enable spacecraft to operate more autonomously and support faster scientific analysis for future missions to the Moon and Mars.
xAI has launched Grok Build, a coding agent designed to compete with products like Anthropic's Claude Code, initially available in beta to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers ($300/month). The release comes as xAI attempts to catch up with competitors in coding capabilities following founder Elon Musk's acknowledgment that the company had fallen behind on this front.
Learn how OpenAI built a secure sandbox for Codex on Windows, enabling safe, efficient coding agents with controlled file access and network restrictions.
Databricks announced that GPT-5.5 is now available for enterprise agent workflows, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the company's OfficeQA Pro benchmark with 50% accuracy and 46% error reduction compared to GPT-5.4. The model demonstrates significant improvements in parsing legacy documents, scanned PDFs, and orchestrating multi-step enterprise tasks through Databricks' AI Unity Gateway, AgentBricks, and Agent Supervisor API.
A maker successfully demonstrates directional control of a vibrobot using only a single vibrating motor by rapidly switching the motor's rotation direction to approximate straight-line movement. The design, based on academic research, uses an ESP-01F microcontroller and Wi-Fi remote control to switch motor direction every 250 milliseconds, enabling the robot to follow traced paths despite slightly erratic movement.
Meta is opening its Ray-Ban Display glasses to third-party developers, allowing them to build display-enabled apps and experiences optimized for the device's 20-degree field-of-view monocular display. The platform will support iOS/Android companion apps and web apps, with Meta suggesting use cases like information overlays, real-time data displays, streaming media, and minigames, though availability timeline remains unclear.
Sea Limited's Chief Product Officer discusses the company's deployment of Codex, an AI tool, across engineering teams to advance AI-native software development practices in Asia. The initiative represents a strategic adoption of AI-powered development tools to accelerate engineering productivity and innovation.
OpenAI has expanded its Codex coding assistant to mobile devices, allowing ChatGPT users on iOS and Android to access and control their Codex projects remotely through the ChatGPT app. The mobile integration uses a secure relay layer to keep credentials and files on local machines while enabling users to prompt Codex and receive updates like screenshots and test results while on the go, contributing to OpenAI's broader super app strategy.
Netflix has launched a new studio called INKubator focused on creating generative AI-powered animated content, starting with short-form animations and potentially expanding to longer-form content. The studio is actively hiring key roles and represents Netflix's broader strategy of integrating AI into content creation, building on the company's existing use of AI in advertising and its acquisition of AI startup InterPositive.
A Gallup survey found that 71% of Americans oppose having AI data centers in their local areas, citing concerns about resource consumption (water, electricity), environmental pollution, and quality-of-life impacts. The poll highlights growing public resistance to data center expansion despite companies' need for increased compute power, with some jurisdictions implementing bans or moratoriums on new construction.
OpenAI found no evidence that user data was accessed.
Mind Robotics, spun out from Rivian by founder RJ Scaringe, raised $400 million to scale AI-powered general-purpose robots for manufacturing automation, bringing total funding to over $1 billion. The company is developing a full-stack platform combining foundation models, purpose-built robotics, and deployment infrastructure, with Rivian serving as its first customer and providing manufacturing environments for model training and data collection.
Promptimus is an automated prompt-engineering framework that optimizes already well-developed LLM prompts without manual intervention by identifying specific failure points and suggesting targeted improvements. The method achieves best results on 16 of 20 benchmarks while outperforming six leading automatic prompt optimization approaches, demonstrating model-agnostic generalizability and sample efficiency across various enterprise tasks.
When generative AI first moved from research labs into real-world business applications, enterprises made a tacit bargain: "Capability now, control later." Feed your proprietary data into third-party...
This article examines the critical role of data quality, security, and accessibility in deploying agentic AI systems within financial services. It discusses how autonomous AI amplifies both the strengths and weaknesses of underlying data, and emphasizes the need for centralized, well-governed data infrastructure to meet regulatory requirements while maintaining accuracy and speed in rapidly shifting markets.
The Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston (May 27-28) will feature a session on humanoid robotics scaling, led by Texas Instruments' Giovanni Campanella, covering system-level innovations in sensing, processing, power management, and edge AI for next-generation humanoid robots. The summit will include 50+ technical sessions and 70+ speakers from leading robotics and AI companies, addressing design challenges like sensor fusion, real-time processing, and motor control critical to humanoid performance.
Anthro Energy and EnPower signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly develop and manufacture high-performance lithium-ion battery cells in the U.S. for robotics, autonomous systems, and defense applications. The partnership combines Anthro's advanced polymer electrolyte technology with EnPower's domestic manufacturing capabilities to create a vertically integrated U.S. battery supply chain, with plans to scale production beyond 750 MWh for applications including drones, unmanned vehicles, and embodied AI systems.
Tesla has begun full-scale production of the Tesla Semi electric truck, nearly a decade after its 2017 announcement, with official specifications showing a base model with 548 kWh battery capacity and 320-mile range priced at $260,000. The company recently received a major order of 370 Tesla Semis from WattEV, an electric freight service company, signaling growing commercial adoption of electric heavy-duty vehicles in a sector that currently contributes 35% of road transport emissions despite representing only 8% of vehicles.
When Jennifer got a job doing research for a nonprofit in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see if the tech would pull up the porn videos...
A hobbyist integrated a LiDAR matrix sensor (64-element array) into Zippy, a 3D-printed ESP32-based robot, to enable autonomous navigation by detecting obstacles and floor features in 3D space. The project demonstrates time-of-flight sensor capabilities for robotics perception, though the sensor mounting resulted in significant data loss and required optimization to process the 3D distance measurements effectively.
