A.I./Robotics

Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) pack billions of transistors into a single piece of silicon. This chip density drives advances in protein structure prediction, weather forecasting, autonomous vehicles and the generative AI wave. Yet such extreme density creates cascading challenges, contributing to the power consumption and heat generation problems affecting advanced AI data centers. A…

When a famously cautious, methodical regulator like the FDA deploys generative AI as the agency recently did with “Elsa,” the industry sits up and takes notice. While there are signs that the tool itself has received something of a mixed response from staff, it also serves as a signpost:  AI has begun an official transition…

The U.S. Department of Defense has directed more than $700 million toward a suite of high-priority research and development initiatives on June 16, 2025. The announcement, posted on the DoD website, signals a push into frontier AI, quantum sensing and advanced battlespace simulation. Headlining the investments were a landmark prototype agreement with OpenAI and significant…

As tech layoffs continue to pile up, a sort of paradox is emerging. Some professionals with the requisite AI/ML experience find themselves getting offers ranging from the high six-figures to reportedly $100 million, according to a recent interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, noting that Meta had approached several of its engineers with nine-figure signing…

[Last updated on June 18, 2025] Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently hinted that AI would result in jobs cuts across the e-commerce giant, declaring “we will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today” as the company accelerates development of over 1,000 generative AI applications. He counseled employees to begin…

In an announcement, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the company has over 1,000 generative AI services and applications in development, while acknowledging he expects the technology will reshape the company’s workforce. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he…

OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. government with AI tools and to “develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” according to the Department of Defense. The work, to be completed in Washington, DC, is estimated to be finished by…

The unicorn biotechnology startup Xaira Therapeutics, co-founded by 2024 Nobel Prize winner David Baker, has released what it claims is the largest public genome-wide Perturb-seq dataset to date. Freely available, the data is available as a 520 GB download and comes with an associated pre-print. Comprising eight million cells, the X-Atlas/Orion dataset dwarfs previous public…

Meta is frustrated. After plowing $45 billion into the Metaverse only to see limited adoption and mounting losses, the company placed big bets on AI with the launch of Llama in 2023. This year, it is investing some $65 billion in capital expenditures with much of that going to AI and data center initiatives. The…

The FDA hails the recent rollout of its internal AI tool, Elsa, as a major move to tackle the crushing weight of regulatory review where documents thousands of pages long are commonplace. But as reports of a rushed, buggy rollout surface, one regulated AI expert Erez Kaminski, a former AI strategist for Amgen and now…

A team from MIT CSAIL, the Jameel Clinic, and Recursion has released Boltz-2, an open-source Python-based biomolecular model that performs physics-level protein-ligand affinity predictions in approximately 18 seconds on a single consumer GPU. This task previously required hours or days on cluster hardware, often costing upwards of $100 per molecule. By releasing the model, weights,…

Just over two months after R&D World covered the debut of Google’s experimental Gemini 2.5 Pro, the company has announced a significant upgrade following a prior May update to the model that drew mixed reactions from developers. Google’s latest Gemini 2.5 Pro has jumped to the top of AI performance rankings with an Elo score…

Designed to help 11,000 researchers “think bigger and discover sooner,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Doudna supercomputer, launching in 2026, will be central to an integrated research fabric. This Dell and NVIDIA-powered system will ingest data from telescopes, fusion tokamaks, and genome sequencers via the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). It will enable near real-time analysis and…

AI agents are shifting from tech demos to practical business applications across life sciences organizations, according to speakers at Google Cloud’s life-sciences roundtable held today.  “Think of these as AI assistants that are going to handle complex tasks on their own, but instead of just answering the questions, they can actually take action,” said Shweta…

Santa Clara-based startup OTAinfo has introduced an on-device AI system designed to enhance reliability on Espressif’s popular and low-cost ESP32 microcontrollers. The embedded intelligence layer, which the company compared in a LinkedIn post to “ChatGPT for ESP32,” runs entirely within the device’s firmware using only 32 kb of memory to predict network communication failures and…

When many organizations first started with AI, many assumed more data is always better.  While in some cases, more data volume does lead to better performance, sometimes added data can hurt. “Garbage in, garbage out, still applies to AI,” said Michael W. Dennis, Ph.D., chief science officer at CAS. This is why CAS emphasizes curating…

For many people, the personal-care aisle may be the last place you associate with machine learning. But for UK-based Unilever, decades of hair-protein data and more than 500 live AI projects have turned those shampoo and skin care shelves into a proving ground. Creating that foundation has been something of a “journey” over the years,…

AI is proving to be a disruptive force for the hardware sector, which has recently shed tens of thousands of jobs. Intel alone has revealed plans to reduce its workforce by over 20%, equating to some 22,000 workers. But at the same time, many hardware firms are ramping up investments in AI, even as they…

Imagine you’re midway through a time-sensitive lab procedure when a Slack ping hits your laptop: “Hey, do you still have those high-res .tiff files from last quarter’s microscopy experiments? A journal editor says he needs them by the end of the day. Sorry, I didn’t let you know sooner.” You don’t recall where they are.…

First came Apple’s 2024 pact to let Siri tap ChatGPT for answers it can’t find on-device. Now OpenAI is spending $6.5 billion in stock to absorb Jony Ive’s skunkworks, io. Ive, known for his work at Apple, where he led design of products such as iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch, and even Apple’s circular…

Nvidia is actively trying to navigate the current U.S. export controls rather than simply waiting for them to expire. The company is said to be pursuing a Shanghai R&D site, as FT reported, while CEO Jensen Huang has branded Washington’s chip‑export curbs on China a “failure.” Huang argued that the restrictions had not only dampened the…

Drugmakers aren’t the only ones upgrading their data plumbing. While Moderna works with Benchling to build out an R&D data platform, NASA has trained a 3 billion parameter model on 100 million Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite images to pull new signals from 25 years of Earth-observation data. Introducing SatVision-TOA The resulting model, known…

Google’s data centers have gained 0.7% more operational capacity thanks to AlphaEvolve, an AI agent that iteratively refines code for optimal performance. This same system also advanced a long-standing geometry challenge by finding a new way to pack 11 identical hexagons. Those are not the only advances. AlphaEvolve also discovered superior algorithms for matrix multiplication…

More than nine out of ten manufacturers (92%) say smart-manufacturing technology will be their chief competitive edge within three years, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Smart Manufacturing and Operations survey of 600 U.S. executives. Nearly 15 years after “Industrie 4.0” promised a literal factory revolution with software and sensing advances reshaping workflows. While the benefits of…

GenAI may represent one of the biggest R&D pushes in recent memory. Gartner forecasts that worldwide spending on generative AI is set to soar to $644 billion in 2025, but the road to broadly useful, and commercially reliable, AI is getting twisty. 1. Meta: Behemoth on ice Meta has slipped the debut of its next-gen large…