In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer in the U.S. Air Force, set out on a training mission to assess damage at an airfield runway, practicing “base recovery” protocol after a simulated attack. For hours, his team walked over the area in chemical protection gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented damage and looked for threats like unexploded munitions. The work is standard for all Air Force engineers before they deploy, but it held special significance for Pietersen, who has spent the last five years developing faster, safer approaches for assessing airfields as a master’s student and now a PhD […]

Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now. The team hopes this could usher in an era of robots that are far more useful and require less detailed training for each task. “One of the big challenges in robotics, and a reason why you don’t see useful robots everywhere, is that robots typically perform well in […]

Since general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China either, where it was developed by Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s made  its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Hugging Face product lead Victor Mustar, praising its performance. Some have even dubbed it “the second DeepSeek,” drawing comparisons to the earlier AI model that took the industry by surprise—both for its unexpected capabilities and its origin.   Manus claims to be the world’s first general AI agent—leveraging multiple AI models (such […]