Anthropic warns small AI models could self-replicate through IoT devices
"Small weight-based replicators" could usher in a new generation of computer worms.
"Small weight-based replicators" could usher in a new generation of computer worms.
Industrial Next helps manufacturers automate complex, delicate tasks that have traditionally required human labor.
Max Hodak, the former president and co-founder of Neuralink, detailed onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt how his company's work with PRIMA is part of its path toward a novel brain-computer interface (BCI).
Our first robotics pod with Dyna’s Chief Scientist on their big bet on World Action Models & the Next Frontier of Physical AI
Gemini 4 Argon marks a step change in physical understanding, code generation, and visual-semantic reasoning—unlocking new workflows across the robotics stack and accelerating progress toward physical AGI. Using pure reasoning, Argon scores 87% on the Embodied Reasoning (ERQA) benchmark, outperforming every other frontier model.
University of Michigan spinout Laplace Intelligence uses AI agents and interactive simulation to stress-test robots and self-driving vehicles before deployment. The profitable startup is competing at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield.
The second-largest corporate employer has bet big on robot workers to scale.
Odyssey is making its world model Odyssey-3 available as a public research preview. The 14-billion-parameter model generates interactive environments from text prompts in real time and can reportedly control robots, drones, and even GTA V. Odyssey claims top scores on physics benchmarks, though the methodology behind those results has limits.
Inside Standard Bots’ AI stack, pretrained models learn factory tasks from demonstrations and improve through corrections from real deployments.
For six years, Danu founder Amy Ma has been working on a better way to sort recyclable waste.
The California State Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist letter to a startup that hosted a match between a human and a robot last month, as reported by The New York Times.
Full-stack safety solution for physical AI is being used by robotics companies.
Industrial AI is entering a new phase. After decades of predictive analytics and other specialized applications, advances in foundation models, physical AI, and agentic AI are making it possible to automate more complex tasks across industrial environments.
The story is a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Aventine, a non-profit research foundation that creates and supports content about how technology and science are changing the way we live. A robot shaped like a human—white with a black head and torso—has been popping up on video feeds.
Reka AI's Rho-1 is a 19-billion-parameter omni-model that processes and generates text, images, video, and robot control actions in a single neural network. Trained on 320 H100 GPUs in about three months, it uses a fraction of the compute today's top models need.
Safeworld is building digital humans to make sure robots don't hurt the real ones.
"One of the biggest reasons we are winning against robotics companies is because we are not a robotics company."
Fei-Fei Li's AI startup World Labs is being acquired by AMD for $8.2 billion. Li, the pioneer behind ImageNet, will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su. World Labs brings its spatial intelligence models, including Atlas, which generates and simulates 3D environments from minimal input.
The acquisition will see World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist.
AMD is acquiring World Labs for $8.2 billion. Since its founding in 2024, World Labs has built model-training teams for images, video and spatial reconstruction, and advanced its robotics simulation capabilities by acquiring SceniX. Its recently released Atlas is an omni model architecture that predicts new viewpoints from 2D images.
Despite challenges, Tesla aims for 1,000 Optimus robots per week by end of 2026.
$11M competition showed wildfire detection is still easier than stopping fires.
Robots are getting smarter, but how can their hardware match that growth? New Microsoft Research findings show that moving AI inference beyond the robot can improve task success, boost efficiency, and support more advanced physical AI workloads.
To build and deploy sophisticated robotics applications that can perceive, reason and act in dynamic environments, developers need new physical AI models and tools. The ROS open framework is a project from Open Robotics that helps humans build robots.
Physical AI is moving rapidly from research to large-scale deployment. By 2035, ABI Research projects an installed base of 49 million level 3-5 autonomous vehicles (AVs), while Omdia estimates that roughly 60 million industrial robots will be deployed between 2026 and 2035.
Gemini Robotics ER 2 helps robots reason, collaborate, and solve real-world tasks. It represents a step change in video understanding, tool orchestration, and multi-robot collaboration for robotic applications.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2, a next-generation robot intelligence layer achieving whole-body control of a complete humanoid robot for the first time, with fine manipulation using both hands and grippers.
NVIDIA introduced Cosmos-H-Dreams, a real-time action-conditioned generative simulator for surgical robots. It runs through FlashDreams on one RTX PRO 6000 GPU and supports closed-loop interaction by humans and policies.
Hugging Face released Grabette, an open-source system recording manipulation demonstrations with a handheld gripper and two cameras, producing robot-ready datasets without robots or teleoperation equipment. The handheld hardware costs about €490 in materials, with the accompanying motorised Gripette gripper around €120. Hardware CAD, Raspberry Pi collection software and browser-based processing are all open-source.
Introducing Robostral Navigate: 8B model achieving 76.6% on R2R-CE with just a single RGB camera. No depth sensors, LiDAR, or multiple cameras needed.
Hugging Face released LeRobot v0.6.0, introducing world model policies VLA-JEPA, FastWAM and LingBot-VA, new VLAs GR00T N1.7, MolmoAct2, EO-1, EVO1 and Multitask DiT, and a unified reward model API with Robometer and TOPReward for the robotics learning loop.
NVIDIA's ENPIRE lets coding agents drive autonomous experiments and iteration with real robot arms. Dual YAM arms and an RTX 5090 workstation achieved 99% success on PushT, pin organisation and cutting cable ties. GPT-5.5/Codex and Opus 4.7/Claude Code traded wins, while Kimi-2.6 lagged. Eight agents found higher-scoring solutions faster.
Google DeepMind launched a three-month Robotics accelerator for 15 early-stage European robotics start-ups, providing technical guidance and access to its AI stack and Gemini robotics models. Covering logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, climate and navigation, it starts in London this week.
Gemini Robotics ER 1.6: Enhancing spatial reasoning and multi-view understanding for autonomous robotics.