Apple just took an understated step that speaks volumes. No big event. No big announcement. A hiring. Apple hired a Google executive, Lilian Rincon, who previously worked on AI products at the tech giant. This comes after the Cupertino-based tech giant partnered with Google’s Gemini AI to improve its digital assistant, Siri. It does sound

Like practically everyone who owned a PC in the early ’90s, I tore through the shareware episode of Wolfenstein 3D shortly after it came out. At the time, the game’s mere existence seemed like a magic trick, offering a smooth-scrolling first-person perspective that was unlike pretty much anything I had ever seen. Strictly speaking, the

Our oceans are full of sophisticated, perfect traps: Nets, hooks, fishing lines. Designed to capture animals destined for our dinner tables, they often catch other wildlife too. This accidental harvest is known as bycatch, and every year it causes the death of millions of marine animals, including whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, and seabirds. Nets and

Over a decade ago, when I was first starting to pretend I could write about quantum mechanics, I covered a truly bizarre experiment. One half of a pair of entangled photons was sent through a device it could navigate as either a particle or a wave. After it was clear of the device, the other

Three-hundred million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic era were buzzing with giant insects. Meganeuropsis permiana, a predatory insect resembling a modern-day dragonfly, had a wingspan of over 70 centimeters and weighed 100 grams. Biologists looked at these ancient behemoths and asked why bugs aren’t this big anymore. Thirty years ago, they came

Meta’s acquisition of Manus is facing a serious problem in China. Two of the startup’s top figures have reportedly been told they cannot leave the country while regulators review the deal, turning what looked like a major AI expansion into a sensitive legal and business issue. The story matters because Manus is not a small

RPA (robotic process automation) is a practical and proven way to reduce manual work in business processes without AI systems. By using software bots to follow fixed rules, companies can automate repetitive tasks like data entry and invoice processing, and to a certain extent, report generation. Adoption grew quickly in many sectors, especially in finance,

At a glance VLM-based robot planners struggle with long, complex tasks because natural-language plans can be ambiguous, especially when specifying both actions and locations. GroundedPlanBench evaluates whether models can plan actions and determine where they should occur across diverse, real-world robot scenarios. Video-to-Spatially Grounded Planning (V2GP) is a framework that converts robot demonstration videos into

At a glance To successfully complete tasks, embodied AI agents must ground and update their plans based on visual feedback. AsgardBench isolates whether agents can use visual observations to revise their plans as tasks unfold. Spanning 108 controlled task instances across 12 task types, the benchmark requires agents to adapt their plans based on what

Claude is starting to move beyond the chat box. Anthropic has introduced a new feature that lets its AI assistant use a person’s computer to complete tasks, including opening apps, browsing the web, and working with spreadsheets. It is a clear step toward AI tools that do more than answer questions. The idea is simple,