Hardware

When you’re training a robot via reinforcement learning, a handcrafted reward function is labor-intensive to build but often dispenses rewards more effectively than a general-purpose reward model based on a vision-language model. Researchers built reward models that narrowed the gap.

The third generation of Apple Foundation Models — fruit of Apple’s collaboration with Google — introduces a variation on the mixture-of-experts architecture that runs on local devices. 

Nvidia’s largest-yet model is among the best-performing from a developer based in the U.S. and among the most open developed by anyone.

Nvidia’s chief scientist dreams of telling an AI model to design a new GPU, then skiing for a couple days while the system does the job.

A small number of humanoid robots have made their way into industrial settings, where they’re roughly matching the cost of human labor and propelling some workers into higher-level roles.

Z.ai updated its flagship open-weights large language model to work autonomously on single tasks for up to eight hours.

OpenAI partnered with Amazon to build infrastructure for agents on the world’s largest cloud platform, a further sign that its close relationship with Microsoft is weakening.

Nvidia, the dominant supplier of AI chips, released a competitive open-source large language model whose speed tops its size class — the first open-weights leader to come from the United States since last year, when Meta delivered Llama 4.

DeepSeek, the Chinese developer of outstanding open-weights models, has withheld an upcoming update of its flagship model from U.S. chip makers, a move that intensifies the AI rivalry between the U.S. and China.

Iran hit at least three Amazon data centers in the Middle East, an indicator of AI’s critical role in the United States’ war against Iran and possibly the first time such facilities have been targeted during warfare.

Meta and OpenAI are among the tech companies that are building private power plants that will operate independently of regional grids to supply electricity for their massive buildout of AI data centers.

Projected demand for output from large language models is spurring a massive buildout of data centers. Researchers asked whether smaller models running on local devices could meaningfully lighten that load.

Reasoning models in the 1 to 2 billion-parameter range typically require more than 1 gigabyte of RAM to run. Liquid AI released one that runs in less than 900 megabytes, and does it with exceptional speed and efficiency.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX acquired xAI, opening the door to richer financing of the merged entity’s AI research, a tighter focus on space applications of AI, and — if Musk’s dreams are realized — solar-powered data centers in space.

The United States government’s effort to deprive China of AI computing power backfired as China turned the tables and banned U.S.-designed chips.