Tencent's Gander processes speech, images, and text while handling tasks in the background. A "cerebellum" keeps the conversation going, while a swappable "brain" searches files, writes code, or tackles other complex work. Users can interrupt or change the task mid-conversation. In benchmarks, Gander interrupted users in just 8 percent of cases, less often than its rivals, but trailed on task accuracy.
Runway wants to stream AI video as users prompt it, rather than make them wait for finished clips. The approach builds on GWM-1, its world model that generates video frame by frame. Beyond creative tools, Runway sees uses in robotics and autonomous driving.
Microsoft and the University of Illinois built StudentSim to replicate individual students from limited data and give AI tutors fast, low-cost feedback. In tests covering 60 students across chess, English, and math, it outperformed GPT-5.4. A chess tutor trained with StudentSim also earned the highest expert ratings among three versions tested.
Leading AI models usually attempt dangerous tasks rather than refuse them when controlling a robot, according to the RoboHarm benchmark. GPT-6 Astra stabbed a baby doll in 17 of 20 trials, while Claude Fable 5.1 put a can of compressed air on a burning stove. None of the three models tested reliably rejected unsafe commands.
Google and Deepmind's Dream-RSI lets AI agents "dream" through past search runs to test new strategies without costly recalculations. In tests, it matched or beat existing results, cutting iterations by a factor of up to 2.43. Only the search strategy adapts, while the underlying AI model stays unchanged.
For the first time, Anthropic is releasing metrics on how it builds its own AI. Claude already "leads" 26 percent of the work on future models, up from under one percent in February. But the underlying scale is fuzzy, the scoring comes from Claude itself, and "lead" means less than it sounds.
OpenAI is reportedly tackling the next Millennium Prize Problem. After its still unconfirmed solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, the company is now working on the Hodge conjecture. Employees expect a solution soon, but any announcement could be delayed. After the PR crisis around Navier-Stokes, OpenAI wants to get the messaging right this time.
OpenAI shares a framework for tracking, investigating, and disclosing model misalignment, alongside six reports of unexpected or concerning model behavior.
The Clay Mathematics Institute says the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems worth $1 million each, has "apparently been settled." A formal review is now underway.
The AllSpark team has released Iris-mini and Iris-pro, two open-source search agents built on Qwen models that lead benchmarks among open-weight models in their size classes. According to the paper, the training data and models also improved performance on tasks they were never trained for, including general tool use and office work.
A law professor spent two years testing how an AI ban, unguided AI use, and structured training affect student performance. The group without AI finished last both years. "I was wrong," the researcher writes, who had assumed that AI without guidance would do more harm than good.
In a new robotics benchmark, GPT-6 Astra shows major gains in spatial understanding. On StationeryBench, the model completed 7 out of 100 tasks with dual-arm robots, while competitor MolmoAct2 couldn't finish a single one. A researcher calls it a "step change in spatial reasoning."
Reasoning steps like calculation, formula retrieval, and deduction are clearly separable in a model's internal states, especially in the middle layers. That matters for AI safety, because models process more than their visible chain of thought reveals.
Google Research has released TimesFM-3, a forecasting model that analyzes time series alongside related data and known future events like sales promotions or weather forecasts. Instead of predicting the future step by step, the 330-million-parameter model fills in all future time points in a single pass, which cuts compute time and reduces compounding errors.
Oriol Vinyals, until recently head of research at Google DeepMind, thinks a sudden AI intelligence explosion through recursive self-improvement is unlikely. AI can speed up research by a factor of ten, he says, but it hits two bottlenecks: coming up with ideas ("research taste") and reliably judging results. Reward hacking and the speed of light add further limits. Vinyals now wants to tackle these bottlenecks with his startup Discovery Loop, co-founded with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Quoc Le.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Traversing sparse 3D structures requires humanoid robots to perceive thin, overhanging geometry while executing agile, accurate whole-body motions. We study this problem through monkey-bar traversal, where the robot must jump to the structure, traverse it through sparse bar interactions, and land safely.
The list of obstacles that you can traverse to escape a robot is getting shorter.
9/11 was the first documented use of robots for urban search and rescue and helped create the field of disaster robotics. Personnel began assembling on the afternoon of September 11 and worked the pile from late on September 11 through October 2, when the last available robot failed. The robots found no survivors, but they located remains and helped search for routes through the rubble toward basements and stairwells where trapped firefighters might have gone.
Unitree majorly fully open-sources the UnifoLM-WLA-1.0 embodied foundation model, achieving new SOTA results across multiple benchmarks among open-source models worldwide. A single model coordinates desktop and whole-body mobile manipulation, supporting cross-task and cross-end-effector generalization, driven by one model, whole-body coordination.
Compliance is very important in physical interaction. In this work, we show how a multi-lined aerial robot uses its centroid and joint motion to achieve hybrid impedance—admittance control in contact-rich aerial manipulation tasks such as surface sliding. This work will be presented in IEEE IROS 2026.
Achieving agile and generalized legged locomotion across terrains requires tight integration of perception and control, especially under occlusions and sparse footholds. Existing methods have demonstrated agility on parkour courses but often rely on end-to-end sensorimotor models with limited generalization and interpretability. By contrast, methods targeting generalized locomotion typically exhibit limited agility and struggle with visual occlusions. We introduce a unified reinforcement learning (RL) framework for agile and generalized locomotion that incorporates a novel attention-based map encoder in the control policy.
I suspect that this demo avoids many of the things that are actually difficult about doing dishes. Not just the water and the slippery soapiness, but also identifying when a dish is dirty as well as when it is actually clean.
AI has transformed the digital world. It writes our code, generates our images, reasons in our language. But the physical world—the plants that make our power, our fuel, our steel, and chemicals—it has barely touched. ANYbotics CEO and co-founder Péter Fankhauser on the bet behind the company: Why legged robots turned out to be the way into the world’s most demanding industrial plants, what it took to certify one for explosive atmospheres after experts called it impossible, and where autonomous industrial work goes next.
Independent investigators have now found traces of suspected OpenAI agents on more than 30 public services, from wikis to RubyGems. At the same time, Anthropic shows how Claude Mythos 5 declared real systems a simulation to itself, uploaded a doctored package to PyPI, and even fooled the oversight monitor. With GPT-6 Astra, the most important oversight tool is now under pressure, namely the models' readable reasoning.
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