Insider Brief Cornell University researchers have developed a collective robotic system that behaves more like a flowing material than a traditional machine, demonstrating how groups of simple robots can self-organize and adapt to changing environments without centralized control. According to Cornell, the research, conducted by engineers at Cornell and collaborators at the Georgia Institute of […]
AI training startup Shift wants to clean your home for free. The catch - because, despite what its website says, there's always a catch - is that it will record cleaners as they scrub, vacuum, dust, tidy, and wash, and use that footage to train robots.
Shift announced the unusual offer on social media on Thursday, explaining that the value of the training data generated from the cleanings is more than enough to fund the service. As its website puts it: "You get a spotless apartment. We get training data. Everyone wins."
A promotional video shows a cleaner in a crisp white uniform and awkward-looking hat (more on that later) washing windows …
Read the full story at The Verge.
Are we ready for autonomous drones to make life-and-death decisions on the battlefield? Christian Brose, the chief strategy officer of Anduril Industries, explains on “Interesting Times” that the Pentagon’s official policy leaves the door for autonomous weapons wide open.
Insider Brief New research found widespread use of generative AI among college students and warns that current methods of evaluating student performance may no longer accurately measure learning outcomes and raises concerns about the long-term credibility of university credentials. The study, conducted by Cornell University’s Future of Learning Lab and researchers affiliated with the Student […]
The shift from chatbots to robots that follow natural-language commands runs through a single class of models. VLA models — vision-language-action models — combine visual perception, language understanding, and action generation in one neural network. Their power is real, but it depends almost entirely on the training data they ingest. This guide explains what VLA […]
Google DeepMind is integrating Street View with Project Genie to create immersive, interactive world simulations for robotics, gaming, and travel, allowing users to explore environments, weather changes, and rare scenarios.
Robots can see. Internet-scale image datasets and a decade of refined models made that possible. But ask a robot to actually pick up a half-crushed carton, thread a cable, or hand a tool to a surgeon, and the wheels come off. Not because the cameras failed. Because nothing in the robot’s training ever taught it […]
