Putting a plant into a planter, placing snacks in containers, and sorting laundry successfully doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have a humanoid robot in your home next year. But the dream of offloading home cleaning, maintenance and maybe even cooking is getting a little more real as Google DeepMind showed off Apptronik’s Apollo robot obeying verbal commands and actioning tasks with objects it had never seen before.In the video, Google shows robots opening Ziploc bags, inserting bread into the bag, sorting laundry by color, and manipulating odd-shaped real-world items that are sometimes squishy, sometimes difficult to pick up. The…
My little theory is that the concept of “imprinting” in psychology can just as easily be applied to programming: Much as a baby goose decides that the first moving life-form it encounters is its parent, embryonic programmers form ineradicable attachments to the patterns and quiddities of their first formative language.For…
A company with $20 billion in annual revenue can’t commit $1.4 trillion to capital infrastructure. It’s simple math: by the end of 2026, market pressure is likely to push OpenAI toward scaling back its record-setting AI data center buildout.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is “looking at commitments of about $1.4 trillion…
The alarm hasn’t yet reached the general public, but tension is beginning to build in the corridors of the aerospace industry, in microchip laboratories, and in government offices. For months, an element almost invisible to the world—yttrium—has become the silent center of a new global dispute. Supplies are thinning, prices…
Retro handheld gaming continues its renaissance, as we’ve got a fresh and delightful new Game Boy Color RPG to look forward to early next year in the form of Gumball in Trick-or-Treat Land. This family-friendly adventure from developer Exquisite Laundry Pet and publisher Mega Cat Studios will officially launch on…
Over 1,000 Amazon employees have anonymously signed an open letter warning that the company’s allegedly “all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development” could cause “staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth,” an internal advocacy group announced on Wednesday.Four members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice tell WIRED…
Friday is here at long last. It’s the first Friday of December. In my hometown, First Friday is a big deal. There’s an art walk, live music. Local retailers will often have free beverages for shoppers (sometimes boozy, but in these chillier times it can be hot cocoa). It’s a…
You might think Amazon’s biggest swing in the AI race was its $8 billion investment in Anthropic. But AWS has also been building in-house foundation models, new chips, massive data centers, and agents meant to keep enterprise customers locked inside its ecosystem. The company believes these offerings will give it…
Twitch “costume play” queen Emily “Emiru” Schunk has been playing dress-up since she was young. Today, the hobby has made her one of the most followed women on Twitch, with 2 million fans on the platform (she has another 5 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X). Schunk started…
It’s Wordle Wednesday which means I have another riddle for you to solve. Every week we spice things up on Wednesdays with an extra riddle, brain-teaser or logic puzzle before solving the Wordle. Here’s today’s:I’m surrounded by water, but I never drink. I can swim for miles, but I never…
“It’s a PR campaign, obviously,” claims Joshua Naftalis, a former prosecutor, now a partner at law firm Pallas Partners. “It’s a no-stone-left-unturned strategy.”To date, Bankman-Fried has not filed a formal pardon application, a White House spokesperson tells WIRED. “We do not discuss speculation about sensitive issues, such as pardons, on-record,”…
Earlier this year, a Peter Diamandis report found about 100 companies working on humanoid robots globally. A few short months later, there are 150 just in China. In fact, the humanoid robot hype is getting so potentially overheated that China’s economic planning agency is warning its robotics sector that too…
Almost everything is on hiatus. The EU AI Act, Digital Services Act, and Digital Markets Act are all at risk. The European Commission is preparing to end the year with virtually no movement on its most important tech policy initiatives. Many measures may even be reversed.In particular, a series of…
In the battle of the competitive mid-range handsets, Google’s Pixel 9a was seen as one of the best choices in the market. How can Google maintain that success when it launches the Pixel 10a? Given the price-sensitive nature of this market space, getting the price right is critical.Pixel 10a DecisionsThis…
It all began, as many things do, with Elon Musk. In the early 2010s he realized that AI was on a track to become perhaps the most powerful technology of all time. But he had deep suspicion that if it were to fall under the control of powerful profit-driven forces,…
Spotlight
Joe Kiniry, a security expert specializing in elections, was attending an annual…
Some of artist David Hockney’s most famous paintings hung in midair last…
When the history of AI is written, Steven Adler may just end…
People are now betting on everything. Prediction markets are amplifying those signals.The…
