Robotics
How Pokémon Go Is Giving Supply Robots an Inch-Good View of the WorldWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Know-how Evaluate ($)
“Niantic Spatial is utilizing that huge and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced knowledge—photos of city landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the telephones of a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of Pokémon Go gamers all over the world—to construct a form of world mannequin, a buzzy new expertise that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.”
Future
A Roadmap for AI, if Anybody Will Pay attentionConnie Loizos | TechCrunch
“The newly printed doc, signed by a whole bunch of consultants, former officers, and public figures, opens with the no-nonsense remark that humanity is at a fork within the street. One path, which the declaration calls ‘the race to exchange,’ results in people being supplanted first as employees, then as decision-makers, as energy accrues to unaccountable establishments and their machines. The opposite results in AI that massively expands human potential.”
Computing
Startup Is Constructing the First Information Heart to Use Human Mind CellsAlex Wilkins | New Scientist ($)
“Information facilities use big quantities of power and chips are in excessive demand—may mind cells be the reply? Australia-based start-up Cortical Labs has introduced it’s constructing two ‘organic’ knowledge facilities in Melbourne and Singapore, stacked with the identical neuron-filled chips that it has demonstrated can play Pong or Doom.”
Robotics
Why Do Humanoid Robots Nonetheless Battle With the Small Stuff?John Pavlus | Quanta Journal
“‘I requested every researcher: Can your flagship robotic—Boston Dynamics’ Atlas or Agility’s Digit, two of essentially the most credible and pedigreed humanoids on Earth—deal with any set of stairs or doorway? ‘Not reliably,’ Hurst mentioned. ‘I don’t suppose it’s completely solved,’ Kuindersma mentioned. …It’s 2026. Why are humanoids nonetheless this…exhausting?”
Future
AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them Extra Intense.Ray A. Smith | The Wall Avenue Journal ($)
“One of many nice hopes for synthetic intelligence—not less than, amongst employees—is that it’ll ease workloads, releasing individuals up for extra high-level, inventive pursuits. Thus far, the alternative is going on, new knowledge present. The truth is, AI is rising the pace, density and complexity of labor quite than lowering it, in line with an evaluation of 164,000 employees’ digital work exercise.”
Future
Karpathy’s March of Nines Reveals Why 90% AI Reliability Isn’t Even Near SufficientNikhil Mungel | VentureBeat
“The ‘March of Nines’ frames a standard manufacturing actuality: You’ll be able to attain the primary 90% reliability with a robust demo, and every further 9 usually requires comparable engineering effort. For enterprise groups, the gap between ‘often works’ and ‘operates like reliable software program’ determines adoption.”
Computing
The Race to Remedy the Greatest Downside in Quantum ComputingKarmela Padavic-Callaghan | New Scientist ($)
“Quantum computer systems are already right here, however they make far too many errors. That is arguably the most important impediment to the expertise actually changing into helpful, however current breakthroughs counsel an answer could also be on the horizon. ‘It’s a really thrilling time in error correction. For the primary time, concept and apply are actually making contact,’ says Robert Schoelkopf at Yale College.”
Robotics
Modular Yard Robotic Mows Lawns, Plows Snow, Gathers Leaves and Trims GrassMaryna Holovnova | New Atlas
“Owners often find yourself with a storage crammed with numerous gear: a garden mower, snow blower, shovels, and instruments for clearing fallen leaves. At the moment obtainable on Kickstarter, the Yarbo M makes an attempt to mix all these particular person instruments into one compact robotic platform that may routinely do all of the yard work.”
Robotics
These Self-Configuring Modular Robots Could One Day Rule the WorldTom Hawking | Gizmodo
“Every unit has a number of factors to which one other unit can connect itself: 18 of them, to be exact, which signifies that simply two items might be mixed in 435 methods. The variety of doable configurations explodes because the variety of items will increase, and by the point you get to 5 items, there are a whole bunch of billions of doable combos.”
Area
This SpaceX Veteran Says the Subsequent Massive Factor in Area Is Satellites That Return to EarthTim Fernholz | TechCrunch
“The reusable rocket has reworked the area trade within the final decade, and a brand new startup led by a SpaceX veteran desires to do the identical for satellites. Brian Taylor, who helped construct satellites for networks like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Leo, based Lux Aeterna in December 2024 to develop satellite tv for pc constructions with a built-in warmth defend that can permit them to return to Earth with their payloads intact.”
Tech
Nearly 40 New Unicorns Have Been Minted So Far This 12 months—Right here They AreDominic-Madori Davis | TechCrunch
“Utilizing knowledge from Crunchbase and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the VC-backed startups that grew to become unicorns in 2026. Whereas most are AI-related, a shocking quantity are targeted on different industries like healthcare and even a couple of crypto firms.”
Area
SETI Thinks It Would possibly Have Missed a Few Alien Calls. Right here’s WhyMatthew Phelan | Gizmodo
“A brand new examine printed by researchers on the SETI Institute, brief for the Seek for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has examined the chance that ‘area climate’ may render sturdy premeditated alien broadcasts into the form of fainter radio alerts that SETI sometimes ignores.”
