The director of a tour operation remembers two tourists arriving in a rural town in Peru determined to hike alone in the mountains to a sacred canyon recommended by their AI chatbot. But the canyon didn't exists — and a high-altitude hike could be dangerous (especially where cellphone coverage is also spotty). They're part of a BBC report on travellers arriving at their destination "only to find they've been fed incorrect information or steered to a place that only exists in the hard-wired imagination of a robot..."

"According to a 2024 survey, 37% of those surveyed who used AI to help plan their travels reported that it could not provide enough information, while around 33% said their AI-generated recommendations included false information." Some examples? - Dana Yao and her husband recently experienced this first-hand. The couple used ChatGPT to plan a romantic hike to the top of Mount Misen on the Japanese island of Itsukushima earlier this year. After exploring the town of Miyajima with no issues, they set off at 15:00 to hike to the montain's summit in time for sunset, exactly as ChatGPT had instructed them. "That's when the problem showed up," said Yao, a creator who runs a blog about traveling in Japan, "[when] we were ready to descend [the mountain via] the ropeway station. ChatGPT said the last ropeway down was at 17:30, but in reality, the ropeway had already closed. So, we were stuck at the mountain top..."

- A 2024 BBC article reported that [dedicated travel AI site] Layla briefly told users that there was an Eiffel Tower in Beijing and suggested a marathon route across northern Italy to a British traveller that was entirely unfeasible...

- A recent Fast Company article recounted an incident where a couple made the trek to a scenic cable car in Malaysia that they had seen on TikTok, only to find that no such structure existed. The video they'd watched had been entirely AI generated, either to drum up engagement or for some other strange purpose.
Rayid Ghani, a distinguished professor in machine learning at Carnegie Melon University, tells them that an AI chatbot "doesn't know the difference between travel advice, directions or recipes. It just knows words. So, it keeps spitting out words that make whatever it's telling you sound realistic..."

There's an 85-second ad (starring a humanoid robot) that argues "Technology promised to save us time. Instead it stole our focus. Opera Neon gives you both back."

Or, as BleepingComputer describes it, Opera Neon "is a new browser that puts AI in control of your tabs and browsing activities, but it'll cost $19.90 per month." It'll do tasks for you, open websites for you, manage tabs for you, and listen to you. The idea behind these agentic browsers is to put AI in control. "Neon acts at your command, opening tabs, conducting research, finding the best prices, assessing security, whatever you need. It delivers outcomes you can use, share, and build on," Opera noted...

As spotted on X, Opera Neon, the premium AI browser for Windows & macOS, costs $59.90 for nine months. Opera neon invite. This is an early bird offer, but when the offer expires, Opera Neon will cost $19.90 per month.
The browser's web page says Opera Neon "can handle everyday tasks for you, like filling in forms, placing orders, replying to emails, or tidying up files. Reusable cards turn repeated chores into single-step tasks, letting you focus on the work that matters most to you."

Opera describes itself as "the company that gave you tabs..."

The food delivery robots that arrived in Atlanta in June "are not our friends," argues a headline at CNN.

The four-wheeled Serve Robotics machines "get confused at crosswalks. They move with the speed and caution of a first-time driver, stilted and shy, until they suddenly speed up without warning. Their four wheels look like they were made for off-roading, but they still get stuck in the cracks of craggy sidewalks. Most times I see the bots, they aren't moving at all... " Cyclists swerve to avoid them like any other obstacle in the road. Patrons of Shake Shack (a national partner of Serve) weave around the mess of robots parked in front of the restaurant to make their way inside and place orders on iPads... The dawn of everyday, "friendly" robots may be here, but they haven't proven themselves useful — or trustworthy — yet. "People think they are your friends, but they're actually cameras and microphones of corporations," said Joanna Bryson, a longtime AI scholar and professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School in Berlin. "You're right to be nervous..."

When robots show up in a city, it's often not because the residents of said city actively wanted them there or had a say in their arrival said Edward Ongweso Jr. [a researcher at the Security in Context initiative, a tech journalist and self-proclaimed "decelerationist" urging a slower rollout for Silicon Valley tech pioneers and civic leaders embracing untested and unregulated technology]... "They're being rolled out without any sort of input from people, and as a result, in ways that are annoying and inconvenient," Ongweso Jr. said. "I suspect that people would feel a lot differently if they had a choice ... 'what kind of robots are we interested in rolling out in our homes, in our workplaces, on our college campuses or in our communities?'"

Delivery robots aren't unique to Atlanta. AI-driven companies including Avride and Coco Robotics have sent fleets of delivery robots to big cities like Chicago, Dallas and Jersey City, as well as sleepy college towns... "They're popping up everywhere," Ongweso Jr. continued, "because there's sort of a realization that you have to convince people to view them as inevitable. The way to do that is to just push it into as many places as possible, and have these spectacle demonstrations, get some friendly coverage, try to figure out the ways in which you're selling this as the only alternative.... If you humanize it, you're more willing to entertain it and rationalize it being in your area — 'That's just Jeffrey,' or whatever they name it — instead of seeing it for what it is, which is a bunch of investors privately encroaching on a community or workplace," Ongweso Jr. said. "It's not the future. It's a business model."
Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani told CNN their goal in Atlanta was reducing traffic — and that the robots' average delivery distance there was under a mile, taking about 18 minutes per delivery.

Serve Robotics has also launched their robots in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, according to the site Robotics 247, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Uber Eats. (Although after the robots launched in Los Angeles, a man in a mobility scooter complained the slow-moving robot swerved in front of him.) And "residents of other cities have had to rescue them when they've been felled by weather," reports CNN.

CNN also spoke to Dylan Losey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech who studies human-robot interaction, who notes that the robots' AI algorithms are "completely unregulated... We don't know if a third party has checked the hardware and software and deemed the system 'safe' — in part because what it means for these systems to be 'safe' is not fully understood or standardized." (CNN's reporter adds that "the last time I got close to a bot, to peer down at a flier someone left on top of it, it revved at me loudly. Perhaps they can sense a hater.")

But Serve's CEO says there's one crucial way robot delivery will be cheaper than humans. "You don't have to tip the robots."

What's the proper punishment for an illegal U-turn? If you're a human being in California, it's a fine of up to $234. If you're a robot, apparently, it's nothing at all. The San Francisco Standard: This injustice became apparent to many Facebook users Saturday night after a viral post from the San Bruno Police Department showed footage of officers pulling over a Waymo for the scofflaw maneuver only to discover that no one was behind the wheel.

The car stopped automatically when it saw the police lights during a Friday evening DUI checkpoint, but instead of a person IRL, officers say they were connected with a Waymo rep over the phone. After a brief exchange, the Waymo was sent on its way. Under current law, officials explained, they couldn't issue a ticket. "Our citation books don't have a box for 'robot,'" they joked on Facebook. "Hopefully the reprogramming will keep it from making any more illegal moves."

YouTube's new "Labs" program plans to "offer a glimpse of the AI features it's developing for YouTube Music," reports Ars Technica.

But Ars Technica adds that this future "starts with AI 'hosts' that will chime in while you're listening to music. Yes, really." (YouTube says the AI aims to "deepen your listening experience"...) The "Beyond the Beat" host will break in every so often with relevant stories, trivia, and commentary about your musical tastes. YouTube says this feature will appear when you are listening to mixes and radio stations. The experimental feature is intended to be a bit like having a radio host drop some playful banter while cueing up the next song. It sounds a bit like Spotify's AI DJ, but the YouTube AI doesn't create playlists like Spotify's robot...

After joining, the YouTube Music app will get a new button on the Now Playing screen with the familiar Gemini sparkle logo. Tapping that will allow you to snooze the commentary for an hour or the remainder of the day. There is no option to completely disable the AI host in the app, so you'll have to opt out of the test if you decide Beyond the Beat is more trouble than it's worth.
YouTube calls it "a way for users to take our cutting edge AI experiments for a test drive," promises that "a limited number of US-based participants can test early prototypes and experiments and influence the future of YouTube. Sign up at YouTube.com/New."

Ars Technica believes "This is still generative AI, which comes with the risk of hallucinations and low-quality slop, neither of which belongs in your music. That said, Google's Audio Overviews are often surprisingly good in small doses."

Meta is making humanoid robots its next massive "AR-sized bet," investing billions into a project led by top roboticists. The focus will be less on hardware and more on software dexterity, aiming to license its robotics platform to manufacturers much like Google licenses Android. The Verge reports: During a recent conversation at Meta's headquarters, CTO Andrew Bosworth said he stood up a robotics "research effort" earlier this year at the direction of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The team's existence has been reported on before, but Bosworth hadn't discussed its strategy in-depth until our interview. "I don't think the hardware is the hard part," he told me ahead of Meta's recent Connect conference. "I'm not saying the hardware isn't also hard, but it's not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the software."

To demonstrate, Bosworth picked up my glass of water from a table between us. "If you know robotics, one of the biggest problems that you have is dexterous manipulation," he said. "These robots, they can stand, they can run, they can do a flip, because the ground is a super stable thing." By contrast, a robot trying to pick up the glass of water would likely "immediately crush it or spill all the water." While Meta is currently building its own humanoid, or "Metabot" as it's called internally, Bosworth envisions the company licensing its software platform to other robot manufacturers. "I don't care about us being the hardware manufacturers," he explained.

MLB has approved the use of robot umpires in the 2026 season. According to ESPN, the system will give teams two challenges per game for balls and strikes where hitters, pitchers, and catchers can request reviews. From the report: Hitters, pitchers and catchers will be the only ones allowed to trigger the system by tapping their head, and if a challenge is successful -- the pitch will be shown on in-stadium videoboards -- teams will retain it. While the vote in favor of the automated ball-strike challenge system was not unanimous -- some of the four players on the 11-man committee voted no, according to sources -- the vote was a fait accompli, with MLB owners all in favor and in possession of a six-seat majority on the committee.

The ABS system uses similar technology to the line-calling system in tennis, with 12 cameras in each ballpark tracking the ball with a margin of error around one-sixth of an inch. The ABS zone will be a two-dimensional plane in the middle of the plate that spans its full width (17 inches). The zone's top will be 53.5% of a player's height and the bottom 27%. Teams that run out of challenges over the first nine innings will be granted an extra challenge in the 10th inning, while those that still have unused challenges will simply carry them into extras. If a team runs out of challenges in the 10th, it will automatically receive another in the 11th -- a rule that extends for any extra inning.

During the league's spring training test this season, teams combined to average around four challenges per game and succeeded 52.2% of the time, according to the league. Catchers, whose value in framing pitches outside the zone to look like strikes could take a hit due to the new rule, were the most successful at a 56% overturn rate, while hitters were correct 50% of the time and pitchers 41%. MLB's minor league testing, which started in 2021, led to Triple-A players in 2023 using ABS challenge three days a week and a full ABS system, with every pitch adjudicated by computer, the other three.

At CES in January, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang "stood flanked by 14 humanoid robots from different companies," remembers the Washington Post. But how close are we to real-world robot deployments?

Agility Robotics "says its factory is designed to eventually manufacture 10,000 robots a year," the Post adds (with "some" of its robots "already at work in e-commerce warehouses and auto parts factories.") Amazon even invested $150 million in the 10-year-old company (spun out from Oregon State University's robotics lab) in 2022, according to the article, "and has tested the company's robots in its warehouses." The e-commerce revolution has spawned sprawling warehouses across the country where products must be organized and customer orders assembled and shipped, but some human workers have said the repetitive work is low paid and leaves them prone to injury. Agility rents out its robots to warehouse owners it says have struggled to keep their human jobs filled, including logistics company GXO, which uses them at a warehouse for Spanx shapewear in Flowery Branch, Georgia, northeast of Atlanta. The robots pick up baskets of clothing from wheeled robots and walk them over to conveyor belts that take them to other parts of the facility.

Agility Chief Business Officer Daniel Diez said facilities like this represent a first step for humanoid robots into gainful employment. "This work gets paid, and we have eyes on large-scale deployments just doing this, and that's what we're focused on," he said. German auto parts company Schaeffler uses Agility robots to load and unload equipment at a factory in Cheraw, South Carolina. Auto part plants have become a favored proving ground for humanoid robots, with Boston Dynamics, the company famous for its videos of back-flipping robots, doing tests with its majority owner, Hyundai.
But meanwhile, RoboForce makes a robot that has two arms on a base with four wheels, the article notes, "providing stability and making it possible to lift more weight than a bipedal robot." Humanoid designs make sense "if it is so important to justify the trade-off and sacrifice of other things," RoboForce CEO Leo Ma tells the Post. "Other than that, there is a great invention called wheels."

Still, the article argues there's "a new drive to make humanoid robots practical," fueled by "the surge of investment in AI" combined with advancements in robotics that "make humanoid designs more capable and affordable." Years of steady progress have made legged robots better at balancing and stepping through tricky terrain. Improved batteries allow them to operate for longer without trailing industrial power cords. AI developers are adapting the innovations behind services like ChatGPT to help humanoids act more independently... The progress has triggered a frenzy of investment in humanoid robots and made them into a mascot for the idea that AI will soon reorder the world on the scale tech leaders have promised... Venture capitalists have invested over $5 billion in humanoid robotics start-ups since the beginning of 2024, according to financial data firm Pitchbook, and the largest tech corporations are also placing bets... Meta is working on integrating its own AI technology with humanoid robots, and Google researchers are collaborating with Austin-based humanoid robot start-up Apptronik... A host of humanoid robot companies has spawned in China, the world leader in complex manufacturing, where the government is subsidizing the industry. Six of the 14 robots that shared the stage with Nvidia's Huang were made by Chinese companies; five were American.
"China's Unitree sells a 77-pound humanoid that stands 4-foot-3 for $16,000..."

Remember those Harvard dropouts who built smart glasses for covert facial recognition — and then raised $1 million to develop AI-powered glasses to continuously listen to conversations and display its insights?

"People Are REALLY Mad," writes Futurism, noting that some social media users "have responded with horror and outrage." One of its selling points is that the specs don't come with a visual indicator that lights up to let people know when they're being recorded, which is a feature that Meta's smart glasses do currently have. "People don't want this," wrote Whitney Merill, a privacy lawyer. "Wanting this is not normal. It's weird...."

[S]ome mocked the deleterious effects this could have on our already smartphone-addicted, brainrotted cerebrums. "I look forward to professional conversations with people who just read robot fever dream hallucinations at me in response to my technical and policy questions," one user mused.
The co-founder of the company told TechCrunch their glasses would be the "first real step towards vibe thinking."

But there's already millions of other smart glasses out in the world, and they're now drawing a backlash, reports the Washington Post, citing the millions of people viewing "a stream of other critical videos" about Meta's smart glasses.

The article argues that Generation Z, "who grew up in an internet era defined by poor personal privacy, are at the forefront of a new backlash against smart glasses' intrusion into everyday life..." Opal Nelson, a 22-year-old in New York, said the more she learns about smart glasses, the angrier she becomes. Meta Ray-Bans have a light that turns on when the gadget is recording video, but she said it doesn't seem to protect people from being recorded without consent... "And now there's more and more tutorials showing people how to cover up the [warning light] and still allow you to record," Nelson said. In one such tutorial with more than 900,000 views, a man claims to explain how to cover the warning light on Meta Ray-Bans without triggering the sensor that prevents the device from secretly recording.
One 26-year-old attracted 10 million views to their video on TikTok about the spread of Meta's photography-capable smart glasses. "People specifically in my generation are pretty concerned about the future of technology," the told the Post, "and what that means for all of us and our privacy."

The article cites figures from a devices analyst at IDC who estimates U.S. sales for Meta Ray-Bans will hit 4 million units by the end of 2025, compared to 1.2 million in 2024.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: They look, move and even smell like the kind of furry Everglades marsh rabbit a Burmese python would love to eat. But these bunnies are robots meant to lure the giant invasive snakes out of their hiding spots. It's the latest effort by the South Florida Water Management District to eliminate as many pythons as possible from the Everglades, where they are decimating native species with their voracious appetites. In Everglades National Park, officials say the snakes have eliminated 95% of small mammals as well as thousands of birds. "Removing them is fairly simple. It's detection. We're having a really hard time finding them," said Mike Kirkland, lead invasive animal biologist for the water district. "They're so well camouflaged in the field."

The water district and University of Florida researchers deployed 120 robot rabbits this summer as an experiment. Previously, there was an effort to use live rabbits as snake lures but that became too expensive and time-consuming, Kirkland said. The robots are simple toy rabbits, but retrofitted to emit heat, a smell and to make natural movements to appear like any other regular rabbit. "They look like a real rabbit," Kirkland said. They are solar powered and can be switched on and off remotely. They are placed in small pens monitored by a video camera that sends out a signal when a python is nearby. "Then I can deploy one of our many contractors to go out and remove the python," Kirkland said. The total cost per robot rabbit is about $4,000, financed by the water district, he added.

Nvidia has launched its Jetson AGX Thor robotics chip module, a $3,499 "robot brain" developer kit that starts shipping next month. CNBC reports: After a company uses the developer kit to prototype their robot, Nvidia will sell Thor T5000 modules that can be installed in production-ready robots. If a company needs more than 1,000 Thor chips, Nvidia will charge $2,999 per module. CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company's largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence, which has led to Nvidia's overall sales more than tripling in the past two years. "We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software," said Deepu Talla, Nvidia's vice president of robotics and edge AI, on a call with reporters Friday.

The Jetson Thor chips are based on a Blackwell graphics processor, which is Nvidia's current generation of technology used in its AI chips, as well as its chips for computer games. Nvidia said that its Jetson Thor chips are 7.5 times faster than its previous generation. That allows them to run generative AI models, including large language models and visual models that can interpret the world around them, which is essential for humanoid robots, Nvidia said. The Jetson Thor chips are equipped with 128GB of memory, which is essential for big AI models. [...] The company said its Jetson Thor chips can be used for self-driving cars as well, especially from Chinese brands. Nvidia calls its car chips Drive AGX, and while they are similar to its robotics chips, they run an operating system called Drive OS that's been tuned for automotive purposes.

China launched the World Humanoid Robot Games on Friday. The three-day event will see 280 teams from 16 countries compete in football, track and field, and table tennis alongside robot-specific challenges including medicine sorting and cleaning services. The event also features 192 university teams and 88 private enterprise teams from the U.S., Germany, Brazil and other nations as well as Chinese companies Unitree and Fourier among participants.

Beijing municipal government serves as an organizing body. The Chinese robotics sector has received over $20 billion in government subsidies in the past year with Beijing planning a one trillion yuan ($137 billion) fund for AI and robotics startups. A previous Beijing humanoid robot marathon saw several competitors emit smoke and fail to complete the course.

Apple is plotting its AI comeback with an ambitious slate of new devices, including robots, a lifelike version of Siri, a smart speaker with a display and home-security cameras, according to Bloomberg. From the report: A tabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion, targeted for 2027, is the centerpiece of the AI strategy, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The smart speaker with a display, meanwhile, is slated to arrive next year, part of a push into entry-level smart-home products.

Home security is seen as another big growth opportunity. New cameras will anchor an Apple security system that can automate household functions. The approach should help make Apple's product ecosystem stickier with consumers, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the initiatives haven't been announced.

Imagine this. Lightning sparks a wildfire, but "within seconds, a satellite dish swirling overhead picks up on the anomaly and triggers an alarm," writes the Los Angeles Times. "An autonomous helicopter takes flight and zooms toward the fire, using sensors to locate the blaze and AI to generate a plan of attack. It measures the wind speed and fire movement, communicating constantly with the unmanned helicopter behind it, and the one behind that. Once over the site, it drops a load of water and soon the flames are smoldering. Without deploying a single human, the fire never grows larger than 10 square feet.

"This is the future of firefighting." On a recent morning in San Bernardino, state and local fire experts gathered for a demonstration of the early iterations of this new reality. An autonomous Sikorski Black Hawk helicopter, powered by technology from Lockheed Martin and a California-based software company called Rain, is on display on the tarmac of a logistics airport in Victorville — the word "EXPERIMENTAL" painted on its military green-black door. It's one of many new tools on the front lines of firefighting technology, which experts say is evolving rapidly as private industry and government agencies come face-to-face with a worsening global climate crisis...

Scientific studies and climate research models have found that the number of extreme fires could increase by as much as 30% globally by 2050. By 2100, California alone could see a 50% increase in wildfire frequency and a 77% increase in average annual acres burned, according to the state's most recent climate report. That's largely because human-caused climate change is driving up temperatures and drying out the landscape, priming it to burn, according to Kate Dargan Marquis, a senior advisor with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation who served as California's state fire marshal from 2007 to 2010.... "[T]he policies of today and the technologies of today are not going to serve us tomorrow."

Today, more than 1,100 mountaintop cameras positioned across California are already using artificial intelligence to scan the landscape for the first sign of flames and prompt crews to spring into action. NASA's Earth-observing satellites are studying landscape conditions to help better predict fires before they ignite, while a new global satellite constellation recently launched by Google is helping to detect fires faster than ever before.
One 35-year fire service veteran who consults on fire service technologies even predicts fire-fighting robots will also be used in high-risk situations like the Colossus robot that battled flames searing through Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris...

And a bill moving through California's legislation "would direct the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to establish a pilot program to assess the viability of incorporating autonomous firefighting helicopters in the state."

Sony has filed a lawsuit in California court against Tencent, alleging the Chinese company's upcoming game Light of Motiram constitutes a "slavish clone" of Sony's Horizon series.

The complaint details extensive similarities between the games, from post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur settings to red-haired female protagonists. Tencent had approached Sony for licensing deals in 2024, which Sony rejected twice.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, OpenAI's new ChatGPT Agent, which can perform multistep tasks for users, proved it can pass through one of the Internet's most common security checkpoints by clicking Cloudflare's anti-bot verification -- the same checkbox that's supposed to keep automated programs like itself at bay. ChatGPT Agent is a feature that allows OpenAI's AI assistant to control its own web browser, operating within a sandboxed environment with its own virtual operating system and browser that can access the real Internet. Users can watch the AI's actions through a window in the ChatGPT interface, maintaining oversight while the agent completes tasks. The system requires user permission before taking actions with real-world consequences, such as making purchases. Recently, Reddit users discovered the agent could do something particularly ironic.

The evidence came from Reddit, where a user named "logkn" of the r/OpenAI community posted screenshots of the AI agent effortlessly clicking through the screening step before it would otherwise present a CAPTCHA (short for "Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart") while completing a video conversion task -- narrating its own process as it went. The screenshots shared on Reddit capture the agent navigating a two-step verification process: first clicking the "Verify you are human" checkbox, then proceeding to click a "Convert" button after the Cloudflare challenge succeeds. The agent provides real-time narration of its actions, stating "The link is inserted, so now I'll click the 'Verify you are human' checkbox to complete the verification on Cloudflare. This step is necessary to prove I'm not a bot and proceed with the action."

Tesla open its first diner/Supercharger station Monday in Los Angeles, reports CNBC — an always-open two-story restaurant serving "classic American comfort food" next to 80-charging stalls surrounded by two 66-foot megascreens "playing a rotation of short films, feature-length movies and Tesla videos."

Tesla described the restaurant's theme as "retro-futuristic". (Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus was outside filling bags of popcorn.) There's souvenier cups, the diner's food comes in Cybertruck-shaped boxes, and the owner of a Tesla Model Y told CNBC "It feels kind of like Disneyland, but for adults — or Tesla owners." (And yes, one of the choices is a "Tesla Burger.")

"Less than 24 hours after opening, the line at the Tesla Diner stretched down the block," notes CNBC's video report. (One customer told CNBC they'd waited for 90 minutes to get their order — but "If you're a Tesla owner, and you order from your car ahead of time, you don't have to wait in line.")

The report adds that Elon Musk "says if the diner goes well, he's looking to put them in major cities around the world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: On the early evening of June 22, 2010, American tennis star John Isner began a grueling Wimbledon match against Frenchman Nicolas Mahut that would become the longest in the sport's history. The marathon battle lasted 11 hours and stretched across three consecutive days. Though Isner ultimately prevailed 70-68 in the fifth set, some in attendance half-jokingly wondered at the time whether the two men might be trapped on that court for eternity. A similarly endless-seeming skirmish of rackets is currently unfolding just an hour's drive south of the All England Club -- at Google DeepMind. Known for pioneering AI models that have outperformed the best human players at chess and Go, DeepMind now has a pair of robotic arms engaged in a kind of infinite game of table tennis. The goal of this ongoing research project, which began in 2022, is for the two robots to continuously learn from each other through competition.

Just as Isner eventually adapted his game to beat Mahut, each robotic arm uses AI models to shift strategies and improve. But unlike the Wimbledon example, there's no final score the robots can reach to end their slugfest. Instead, they continue to compete indefinitely, with the aim of improving at every swing along the way. And while the robotic arms are easily beaten by advanced human players, they've been shown to dominate beginners. Against intermediate players, the robots have roughly 50/50 odds -- placing them, according to researchers, at a level of "solidly amateur human performance."

All of this, as two researchers involved noted this week in an IEEE Spectrum blog, is being done in hopes of creating an advanced, general-purpose AI model that could serve as the "brains" of humanoid robots that may one day interact with people in real-world factories, homes, and beyond. Researchers at DeepMind and elsewhere are hopeful that this learning method, if scaled up, could spark a "ChatGPT moment" for robotics -- fast-tracking the field from stumbling, awkward hunks of metal to truly useful assistants. "We are optimistic that continued research in this direction will lead to more capable, adaptable machines that can learn the diverse skills needed to operate effectively and safely in our unstructured world," DeepMind senior staff engineer Pannag Sanketi and Arizona State University Professor Heni Ben Amor write in IEEE Spectrum.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has made a big push to get agencies like the Food and Drug Administration to use generative artificial intelligence tools. In fact, Kennedy recently told Tucker Carlson that AI will soon be used to approve new drugs "very, very quickly." But a new report from CNN confirms all our worst fears. Elsa, the FDA's AI tool, is spitting out fake studies.

CNN spoke with six current and former employees at the FDA, three of whom have used Elsa for work that they described as helpful, like creating meeting notes and summaries. But three of those FDA employees told CNN (paywalled) that Elsa just makes up nonexistent studies, something commonly referred to in AI as "hallucinating." The AI will also misrepresent research, according to these employees. "Anything that you don't have time to double-check is unreliable. It hallucinates confidently," one unnamed FDA employee told CNN. [...] Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission issued a report back in May that was later found to be filled with citations for fake studies. An analysis from the nonprofit news outlet NOTUS found that at least seven studies cited didn't even exist, with many more misrepresenting what was actually said in a given study. We still don't know if the commission used Elsa to generate that report.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary initially deployed Elsa across the agency on June 2, and an internal slide leaked to Gizmodo bragged that the system was "cost-effective," only costing $12,000 in its first week. Makary said that Elsa was "ahead of schedule and under budget" when he first announced the AI rollout. But it seems like you get what you pay for. If you don't care about the accuracy of your work, Elsa sounds like a great tool for allowing you to get slop out the door faster, generating garbage studies that could potentially have real consequences for public health in the U.S. CNN notes that if an FDA employee asks Elsa to generate a one-paragraph summary of a 20-page paper on a new drug, there's no simple way to know if that summary is accurate. And even if the summary is more or less accurate, what if there's something within that 20-page report that would be a big red flag for any human with expertise? The only way to know for sure if something was missed or if the summary is accurate is to actually read the report. The FDA employees who spoke with CNN said they tested Elsa by asking basic questions like how many drugs of a certain class have been approved for children. Elsa confidently gave wrong answers, and while it apparently apologized when it was corrected, a robot being "sorry" doesn't really fix anything.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Automated surgery could be trialled on humans within a decade, say researchers, after an AI-trained robot armed with tools to cut, clip and grab soft tissue successfully removed pig gall bladders without human help. The robot surgeons were schooled on video footage of human medics conducting operations using organs taken from dead pigs. In an apparent research breakthrough, eight operations were conducted on pig organs with a 100% success rate by a team led by experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US. [...]

The technology allowing robots to handle complex soft tissues such as gallbladders, which release bile to aid digestion, is rooted in the same type of computerized neural networks that underpin widely used artificial intelligence tools such as Chat GPT or Google Gemini. The surgical robots were slightly slower than human doctors but they were less jerky and plotted shorter trajectories between tasks. The robots were also able to repeatedly correct mistakes as they went along, asked for different tools and adapted to anatomical variation, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Science Robotics. The authors from Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Columbia universities called it "a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems." [...]

In the Johns Hopkins trial, the robots took just over five minutes to carry out the operation, which required 17 steps including cutting the gallbladder away from its connection to the liver, applying six clips in a specific order and removing the organ. The robots on average corrected course without any human help six times in each operation. "We were able to perform a surgical procedure with a really high level of autonomy," said Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. "In prior work, we were able to do some surgical tasks like suturing. What we've done here is really a full procedure. We have done this on eight gallbladders, where the robot was able to perform precisely the clipping and cutting step of gallbladder removal without any human intervention. "So I think it's a really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously." Currently, nearly all of the NHS's 70,000 annual robotic surgeries are human-controlled, but the UK plans to expand robot-assisted procedures to 90% within the next decade.